T R A N S C R I P T

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To that mirror we added video projection. The projected image is refracted by the mirror to the floor where it's automatically combined with performers into a composite image for the audience. Performers can be freed from gravity and organized according to the logic of video. This interscenium allowed new spatial possibilities for the choreography in which live and pre-recorded dancers in different places could be combined. And, as we used a one-way mirror, we could, with proper lighting, incorporate live dancers in indeterminate spaces off stage, behind the mirror. This combination of mirror and video enables a hyper-virtuostic performance. Theater space is inherently a space of magical effects that are assumed to be controlled from off stage. Intersecting "real-time" technologies with live performance has to overcome the reading of stage effects. We were intrigued with real-time electronic regulation of movement on the stage, modeled on the electronic cuff -- considered by some to be an humane confinement in which prisoners via satellite tracking are kept within geographical limits, in effect, on an electronic leash.

Our collaborator, Kirk Woolford, developed an optical tracking system, based on a Gulf War technology, that uses a live video camera which transmits information to a computer programmed to seek and track an agreed upon trigger -- the color green in this case. The computer follows the trigger and draws a cross-hair in real-time which it projects onto the performer like an obsessive sniper's gun-sight. Red is also tracked: four fickle controllers regulate a virtual cage, the "official" zone of performance. THE RHETORIC OF NEW MEDIA too often depends on a radical discontinuity with existing social and political structures divorced from the troublesome problems of actual space. We prefer to find ways in which new technologies can infiltrate existing cultural structures and everyday, operational space. The shown work shown tonight is dependent on cultural assumptions about "real time" and "real space." Our aim in these projects is to interfere in the presumed spatial and temporal "liveness" of events, to tease the distinctions between live and mediated, to undermine the authority of live over mediated experience and to collapse the two.

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