Marc and I have just had confirmation of our participation in the Liminal Screens programme at BMNI next March (yay!) where we will be working with collaborative net art platforms. So I would like to reflect on two online performances that I enjoyed during the Intimacy conference/festival, while they are still fresh in my memory. The performances were both very rich and very different from each other.

Belonging by Avatar Body Collision

Firstly, Belonging, a scripted, real-time performance in 11 scenes, by the 4 globally dispersed performers of Avatar Body Collision (ABC), with online audience participants, within the Upstage online performance tool. Upstage borrows tropes of theatre and of stage performance: stage, backdrop, characters/avatars, spoken word (via computer-voice & text in speech bubble) and incidental music. It hybridises the old social spaces of MUDs with traditional theatre so that online audience can all speak (well...write...through text-chat), and in some cases, take to the stage with their avatars too. Avatars move hovercraft-like in front of a backdrop. Together with recent additions such as a live webcam feed and the live drawing tool, it is a fabulous and strange conjunction of dramatic and artistic devices. I was transfixed by the complex new possibilities opened up by the tool.

I came in late to the performance - so only caught the last 4 scenes(doh!). In the physical space of a Goldsmiths seminar room, the London based ABC performer, Karla Ptacek sat, tapping away at her laptop next to a large projection, which displayed the "stage". Scene 8 (the point at which I arrived), showed (through a web cam) a grainy figure moving restlessly on a bed; her outline, continually sketched and re-sketched in free-hand lines to follow her movements. Next, the main protagonist engaged in comedic feminist banter with Aristotle (two avatars with speech bubbles against a graphic backdrop), after which she became the subject of a salacious sex auction (again performed over webcam - but this time, pimped by an avatar, and bid for by online audience through text-chat). Now I really want to see archives and recordings of the work created as part of their 070707 Festival.

Then on Saturday, as part of the Intimacy Show and Tell Marathon, a screening of the documentary video of L'un la poupée de L'autre (One the puppet of the other) from the performance series by Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech with technics and interface development by Clément Charmet.

Annie described the original set-up for the performance, given at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, earlier in the year. The performers worked inside two igloo tents on stage, with laptops, webcams and microphones which were connected via the Internet and displayed through a simple interface (built by Charmet). The audience saw their two shadows moving about in the tents, below a large projection. The simple rule was that the performers took it in turns to ask each other to do things. Annie explained how she was exploring the experience of public solitude on the Internet and its impacts on our experience of intimacy. This is part of her ongoing artistic process that also currently finds expression in the series of collaborative art events online, Breaking Solitude.

The soft hazy pastels of the webcam images created an impression of otherworldliness, where the walls of the tents evoked two floating worlds, miles apart, occupied by two solitary humans preoccupied with opportunities for intimacy. In this enthralling half hour performance, I forgot about the accretion of skills, tools and protocols, necessary to enable the performance, so that all that remained for my conscious consideration was a contingent and vulnerable human interaction expressed through request, action, request, action. I found this work poignant and moving.

L'un la poupée de L'autre by Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech

Belonging is narrative, scripted theatre that takes place on an online stage, with unscripted participation by the online audience. After the event on Friday, Karla (who is one of the regular writers for ABC) talked about her initial discomfort with writing with public participation in mind. And now this makes me think of the rash of trendy pantomimes appearing in London written to encourage audience participation.

On the other hand L'un la poupée de L'autre is a performed installation that straddles two kinds of public space, physical and virtual, in an exact and specific way to set the scene for an unscripted but closed (non-participative) interaction. Perhaps we could consider it scripted (in the sense that computer code is script) in that it deploys a simple rule set - but it doesn't have a preset narrative or dialogue.

So... I am intrigued by these two very different approaches to networked performance especially their exploration of the tension between the artistic control of narrative in relation to the audience. Artists need to work carefully with both openness (to audience participation) and contingency (the unrehearsed actions and responses of the artists and the technologies) to create dynamic, online performance. These are the alchemical processes whereby networked performers can stir our emotions and transmute our consciousness, regarding our place in the socio-emotional fabric; a fabric woven from Internet-enabled technologies and networks of human-beings.