'SCHENGEN Control Observation Point' by Schauplatz International

taken from Laura Palmer Foundation project's description

Schauplatz International, one of the most interesting Swiss independent theatre groups of the moment, employs journalistic methods in its work. The artists always begin by conducting thorough research: interviewing people, searching for information on the Web, inspecting the site, and comparing various viewpoints. The result is a theatre that is community-oriented, political, and documentary. Schauplatz has, for instance, recreated onstage the interviews immigrants have to go through when applying for asylum in Switzerland, re-enacted live the movie Free Willy, and exposed tax fraud in the Swiss town of Zug through the active participation of tax experts and corporate managers. Poland’s admission to the Schengen zone and the fact that Frontex, the European Union’s external-border security agency, is located in Warsaw, were the reasons for Schauplatz’s interest in Warsaw and the 10th-Anniversary Stadium. In the middle of the field of grass that had overgrown the pitch the artists recreated a portion of Poland’s eastern border, which is also the EU’s Eastern border, on a scale of 1:1. A control observation point was constructed on the crown of the stadium, from which viewers were able to monitor the EU’s Eastern frontier. During the eight hour-long live installation, the artists picnicked on the pitch, held discussions about the abstractness of borders, the construction of national identity, and the meaning of the EU flag. Their voices were relayed to the crown of the stadium, and binoculars and telescopes were provided for the viewers to view the action.

The starting point for the performance was the reflection that stadiums and borders are meant to build national identity. While stadiums are concrete architectural objects whose construction takes several years to complete, borders are products of our imagination, involving contracts, symbols, and potential violence. Both borders and stadiums are supposed to tell us who we are. Until recently, Frontex had its offices near the Stadium. The agency, in collaboration with the police, the military, and the secret services operates rapid-intervention teams and organises people-hunts and charter deportations. As a result, illegal immigrants resort to ever more dangerous ways of crossing borders. On their way to work every day, Frontex employees passed the Stadium, a place that, like national borders, used to divide people between legals and illegals. Schauplatz’s one-day live installation required close observation. When the artists saw the 10th-Anniversary Stadium for the first time, they immediately realised that their performance had to dialogue with scale, with dimension — ‘large’ vs. ‘small’, the hugeness of the stadium vs. the littleness of the individual within it. They wanted to give the viewer the possibility of different views. One of those was looking through binoculars at an ordinary piece of grass, where nothing happens. The artists did not force themselves on the stadium; instead they created a situation of live exhibition, turning themselves into objects of display. They also invited special guests.

One of those was software expert Hubert Kowalski, who in a matter-of-fact manner described the functioning of software that makes it possible for border guards to tell whether it is a human or animal crossing the border. He described robots that can recognise movement, objects, or the presence of living organisms, and explained the functioning of heat-sensitive cameras installed along borders. He also added that his hobby was re-enactments of historical battles. A little earlier a refugee from Chechnya, Aslan Dekaev, had appeared on the pitch, followed by someone who re-enacts events from World Wars I and II. The artists then wondered out loud whether fifty years from now military-history enthusiasts will be re-enacting the events in Grozny. The situation of obliqueness, uncertainty, and non-action created by Schauplatz was intentional, as the artists consciously renounce control of the situations they set in motion. With their subdued inaction, they provoked viewers to stroll about the Stadium, to enter the field of action — as if the artists’ presence were not important, and they were the reason the viewers were there. ‘We had the impression we had become a sonic background for the audience. It may be somewhat disappointing for an actor, because it means he has failed to attract viewers’ attention. But the Stadium seems to have simply been more important than us.’

http://www.schauplatzinternational.net/

Panoscope 360 by Luc Courchesne

http://panoscope360.com/
http://tot.sat.qc.ca/dispositifs_panoscopes.html
http://www.lamic.ulaval.ca/recherche/lieux_de_recherche/laboratoire_de_visualisatio
http://www.pfoac.com/zOLDSITE/artists/lc-english.htm
http://www.pfoac.com/index_FR.html#VIEW
http://www.din.umontreal.ca/courchesne/

Processing

http://processing.org/
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students.

120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class
Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

view more here



Shiffman is the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor.That hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

Read more here

dance-techLIVE

http://www.dance-tech.net/page/dancetechlive-beta

The OpenEnded Group

http://www.openendedgroup.com/
The OpenEnded Group is three digital artists — Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser — who create works for stage, screen, gallery, page, and public space.
Kaiser and Eshkar have collaborated on numerous projects since the mid-1990s. Interested from the start in creating a new kind of 3D space that did not aspire to photorealism, we thought instead about drawing. Soon we formulated the notions of drawing as performance and hand-drawn space, which we then applied to motion-captured performance in a series of collaborations with choreographers. Of these, perhaps the best known are BIPED, with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, with Bill T. Jones.
Watch videos like 'Verge (Complete)' (Verge uses volumetric light to explore the idea of “blind 3D” in which black zones of the image may be read as voids or as dark solids) and clips 'Movement Principles' of Robert Wilson's instructions on how to move your body on stage

"Theater Of War" by John Walter

John Walter labels his film Theater Of War “a documentary about art and politics,” which is the kind of blatant provocation meant to pay homage to the film’s ostensible subject, Bertolt Brecht. In 2006, Walter was allowed to film the rehearsals for George C. Wolfe’s Central Park production of Brecht’s anti-war play Mother Courage And Her Children, starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Austin Pendleton, with a Tony Kushner translation and songs by Jeanine Tesori. Walter was also granted extended time with Streep, who allowed a rare and reluctant glimpse at her process in deference to Brecht, an artist who favored exposing his own artifice. Walter intersperses his coverage of the Mother Courage production with biographical sketches and analysis of Brecht—much of it provided by post-modern novelist Jay Cantor. At one point, Walter shoots some stock footage of Cantor working at his computer, then cuts to a shot of what Cantor is writing: a few idle lines about how much he hates pretending to work for the sake of a movie.

Though Theater Of War is informative—both about Brecht and about the effort it takes to mount a big New York production—Walter overreaches in trying to connect Brecht’s anti-war sentiment with contemporary protest movements, and doesn’t do more than dabble with the themes of truth and representation in documentary filmmaking. There’s an interesting section about how in Brecht’s 1947 appearance before HUAC, he used his own theatrical techniques to throw Congress off the scent of his Marxist leanings; for the most part though, Walter is unable to make the intersection between art and politics in Brecht’s work really come to life. The problem is built into the documentary’s design. While Theater Of War contains a few direct, empathetic moments—like Kushner describing how Mother Courage changed his life when he read it in college, or Streep explaining that she sees her role in theatrical revivals to be “the voice of dead people”—Walter would rather we care about the ideas this film raises, not the people we meet. Which is very Brechtian, to be sure, but not always so engaging
http://www.avclub.com/content/cinema/theater_of_war?utm_source=imdb_rss_1
http://filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/2008/12/john-walter-theater-of-war.php

Projecting Performance

Interrelationships between performance and technology, dancer and operator

Projecting Performance is a collaboration between performance academics from the School of Performance & Cultural Industries and digital technologists from KMA Creative Technology Ltd. This AHRC-funded project focuses on the choreographic and scenographic exchange between dancers and projected digital images within a theatrical context. It questions processes of performance and perceived boundaries between performers and technologists, and instead it promotes dialogues in an iterative cycle of creative development.....more information
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/paci/projectingperformance/home.html

On Scenography

http://www.sceno.org/
http://www.scenofest.org/index.html

Labyrinth by Misnomer Dance Theatre

http://www.misnomer.org/labyrinth

Tinman by Chris Elman

The piece exemplifies Elam’s pointed use of elongated sculptural shapes to convey emotional states. The angularity draws from Balinese movement and is performed in a manner that is meant to draw an audience into the dancer’s physical experience as he negotiates his own body.

Choreographic Captures

http://www.choreographiccaptures.org/

Video projection tools v2.1

The videoprojection tool was developed during a workshop that Hc Gilje gave for students of scenography, choreography and directing at KHIO in Norway june 2007, and further developed for the workshop he had at the medialab prado in Madrid may 2008 (including some features from the newly released max 5).
The workshops were an introduction to working with video as a tool for creating and transforming spaces: to thinking of video as light, and how you can mask a projection to project on multiple objects and surfaces within the projector´s projection angle and to exploit the depth of field in video projectors.
You can find more here: http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/resources/video-projection-tools/
http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/
http://hcgilje.com

Crisis in the Credit System

www.crisisinthecreditsystem.org.uk
Crisis in the Credit System is a four-part drama dealing with the credit crisis, written and directed by artist Melanie Gilligan.
A major investment bank runs a brainstorming and role-playing session for its employees, asking them to come up with strategies for coping with today's dangerous financial climate. While diligently pursuing this task, five individuals inadvertently role-play their way into bizarre make-believe scenarios forming disturbing conclusions about the deeper significance of the credit crisis and its effects beyond the world of finance.
Using fiction to communicate what is left out of documentary accounts of the crisis, the short, TV-style episodes reflect the strangeness of life today in which the financial abstractions which govern our lives appear to be collapsing.
http://www.artangel.org.uk/pages/present/present0908_crisis.htm

Digital Performance Archive

http://ahds.ac.uk/ahdscollections/docroot/dpa/authorssearch.jsp

Implied Violence

http://www.impliedviolence.com/index.html

The Maastricht McLuhan Institute

The Maastricht McLuhan Institute (MMI), European Centre for Digital Culture, Knowledge Organisation and Learning Technology, was officially opened by Dr Eric McLuhan (the son of well-known media theorist Marshall McLuhan) in November, 1998 and began its formal activities in January, 1999 at the Grote Gracht 82 in Maastricht.
The mission of the Maastricht McLuhan Institute (MMI) is to study and develop methods for knowledge organisation and knowledge management in a digital, distributed, multimedia world. These methods will be applied to cultural heritage, the design of learning technologies and new electronic services for business. Research will also explore the implications thereof.

Here you can find all about perspective in many articles wtitten by Dr Kim H. Veltman - Scientific Director and Manager Digital Culture of the instistute.
Download for free two of the forth volumes of his seminal work:
Bibliography of the Literature and Sources of Perspective.
Volume 1. Sources of Perspective
Volume 2. Bibliography of Sources
Volume 3. Literature on Perspective and Appendices
Volume 4. Bibliography of Literature
http://www.mmi.unimaas.nl/people/Veltman/publications.htm#Perspective

amber '08

http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/
special performance section: http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/index.php?m=works&sm=1&id=3
and New Media in performance: http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/index.php?m=works&sm=4&id=39

PERFORMING PRESENCE: FROM THE LIVE TO THE SIMULATED

http://presence.stanford.edu/
http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/conference_announce.shtml
http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/welcome.shtml
An international conference, Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter, UK, 26-29 March 2009

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS*:
• Matt Adams, Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/
• Tim Etchells, Artistic Director, Forced Entertainment http://www.forcedentertainment.com/
• Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance ands Visual Culture, Roehampton University http://www.adrianheathfield.com/
• Lynn Hershman-Leeson, media artist http://www.lynnhershman.com/
• Hugo Glendinning, photographer, AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, University of Exeter http://www.hugoglendinning.com/
• Ken Goldberg, artist, Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR),, UC Berkeley and Director, Berkeley Centre for New Media http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/index-flash.html
• Mike Pearson, Professor of Performance Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth http://www.aber.ac.uk/~psswww/shared/general/pearson.htm and Mike Brookes, artist http://www.mikebrookes.com/
• Paul Sermon, media artist, Professor of Creative Technology, University of Salford http://www.paulsermon.org/
• Michael Shanks, archaeologist, The Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology, Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/~mshanks/
• Marianne Weems, Artistic Director, The Builders Association http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/
• Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor of Visual Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://architecture.mit.edu/people/profiles/prwodicz.html

CALL FOR PAPERS:
The conference will engage with a wide range of disciplines, art and performance practices, technologies of presence, theory and modes and practices of documentation. Key questions may include:
• What are the chief signifiers of presence?
• How is presence achieved through theatrical performance?• What makes a memory come alive and live again?
• How are practices of presence connected with senses of self and identity?• Is presence synonymous with 'being in the moment'?
• What is the nature of the ‘co-presence’ of audience and performer?• Does presence imply distance?
• Where does performance practice end and its documentation begin?
• In what tense does documentation take place?• Can technology produce presence?
• Is presence a form of immersion?
• Is documentation theory or practice?
• What happens when documentation becomes time-based and ephemeral?
• Where does practice end and its documentation begin?
• In what tense does documentation take place?

Compagnie Amoros & Augustin

Watch some video from this amazing theatre company's performances:

on shadow theatre

Sunjata

mixing shadow theatre and film

360° à l'ombre

mixing theatre and film

The Never-Ending Shooting

video and photos of the technique

More videos: http://fr.youtube.com/BrunodeBeaufort
Official site: http://www.amoros-augustin.com/accueil.html

Blog: http://leterneltournage.theatre-contemporain.net/

NIP (New Interfaces for Performance)

NIP (New Interfaces for Performance) is a practical, artists led, workshop and touring event, which examines techniques for creating mixed media and interactive work for live, interactive contexts - for the most this refers to live performance (music, theatre, dance, sound) and interactive, real-time installation.
http://newinterfaces.net/nip/

GRAMMA - Journal of Theory and Criticism

Journal of Theory and Criticism is an international journal, published in English and Greek once a year by the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in collaboration with the Publications Department of the university. It welcomes articles and book reviews from a wide range of areas within the theory and criticism of literature and culture. Of particular interest to the journal are articles with an interdisciplinary approach. Each individual issue has guest editors and is devoted to a subject of recent cultural interest, with book reviews relevant to the topic. All manuscripts are subject to blind peer review and will be commented on by at least two independent experts.
http://www.enl.auth.gr/gramma/