Performance

How do we piece together a story like this one? A mystery. The title offers more questions than answers. There he was, gone. Where is there? Who is he? Where has he gone? How is this sentence even possible? There he was, not there. As if "he" is in two places and in no place, both at once. The once of "once upon a time." This story has to do with time. This story has to do with place. That much is clear. We take time to look around the story space. What do we see? A corner of a map. An abstraction of a place too detailed to place, unless the places it names are already familiar. Is this a local story then? For locals, between locals… if we do not know the answer to this question, then we are not local. We seem to have stumbled upon an ongoing conversation. Listen. A dialogue of sorts. It's too late. An argument, even. One interlocutor instigates. Can't you feel anything? The other obfuscates. It's only the spring squalls over the bay. All that's not said between these two hangs in a heavy mist, a sea fret low over a small fishing boat turned broadside to a pack of hump-backed slick black rocks. This story is fishing inshore. Close to home. Tell me then. Where was he found? A litany of place names follows. No answers. More questions. Wait. Listen. This story keeps shifting. Slow scrolling lines of poem roll in. set sail on home sick ship shape house wreck. What help is that to anyone? We arrive and we have only just finished leaving. What use is a poem? We sift through the fine print, searching for clues. GALE WARNING IN EFFECT, Funk Island Bank. Weather conditions for today's date. Wind northwest 25 knots diminishing to west 15 this morning and to light this afternoon. Is the disappearance hinted at in the title a recent one? There he was, gone. Whoever he was, wherever he went, this story springs from his absence. J. R. Carpenter 2012

A performance of text generators by Nick Montfort.

make-shift is a house party, performance, and networked salon. Each live event telematically connects participants in two ordinary houses and an online performance space, using the cyberformance platform UpStage (www.upstage.org.nz) in conjunction with audio-visual streams from the two houses. The theme of the work centers around consumption and disposal in late capitalism. Crutchlow and Jamieson describe themselves as "brokers" of the event, combining scripted performance with improvisation and activities in which everyone participates in various ways, becoming co-authors in a collaborative process. 

“Circle” is an augmented reality tabletop theatre piece that tells the story of three generations of women through a series of small stories. The first version of this piece was created using a custom marker tracking system and the user interacted with the piece by exploring the markers with a webcam, triggering small poetic voiceovers and videos.  The version being premiered here was built in Unity and uses natural feature tracking -- the black and white markers of the earlier version are replaced by objects and photos.  The user interacts with the piece by holding up an iPad or smartphone as a magic looking glass to explore the story world.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)

Winner of the Jury's Choice Award in the ELO 2012 Media Art Show.