The CyPosium 2012

On 12 October 2012, The CyPosium was organised by a group of artists interested and involved in online performance practices as a one-day online a cyberformance symposium.

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. The CyPosium aimed to remember, to document and to discuss.

The CyPosium was hosted on the Waterwheel Tap and UpStage, where artists and researchers presented and discussed their online performances with other artists, researchers and interested participants. Questions tackled included: 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 selected 9 presentations and an introduction. The CyPosium is documented on this website.