an online symposium on cyberformance
Since the early 1990s, there has been a growing body of live performance that is situated online. These events differ enormously in form and content, are described with multiple terms (such as cyberformance, remote performance, internet theatre, screen stage, computer-mediated performance), are staged in a variety of online environments (such as text-based and graphical chat rooms, sound broadcast, real time choreography for screen, virtual worlds, games and purpose-built or existing platforms as for instance facebook) and engage diverse audiences. The net, however, is forgetful: it loses the memory of those events, and of the people who lived them, of the environments and communities who hosted them.
On 12 October 2012, a cyberformance symposium was hosted by UpStage, the Waterwheel Tap and independent cyberformers, where cyberformers will discuss their online performances with other artists, researchers and interested participants. Questions we would like to tackle in CyPosium include: What different kind of events happened? What did they make possible? What was special about the event? Why were things done in a certain way and what were the results?
We invited proposals for presentations about past online performances (click here to see the call) and received a very good response, from which we have selected 9 presentations and an introduction. We will announce the schedule in early September and hope that you will join us online for what promises to be a day of diverse presentations and lively discussions.