@ Banff New Media Institute Canada, ADA network-New Zealand, De Balie Amsterdam.
E-SMOG: Networked Data-Veils
Context: E-Smog is a world wide networked conference on intensifying tele-presence experiences in the context of a sustainable society.
Three dataveils form a network interacting three different locations and time zones. Through participating in the same system, the bodies of the veil- wearers mediate a collective public space.
Each screen in the networked show presents a different location:
Screen 1 - De Balie Amsterdam in Netherlands
Screen 2 - ADA network-New Dunedin in New Zealand
Screen 3 - Banff New Media Institute in Canada
Screen 4 - TELE_TRUST database
A world wide virtual community gazes at each other, mediated by the invisible tangible body in the veil.
The screens - showing real time presence - define the physical space. As a virtual agora,they form a virtual double of the environment, part of a networked database.
Eric Kluitenberg: ‘3 Data-Veils are deployed in different places at the same time form a connected network. The veil worn by visitors in the different locations is first a local performance / happening (in the sense of the participatory aspect), where the wearer can trigger statements, about trust in public space, by touching her or his own body. The stories are based on interviews collected in the different local contexts. During the performance, which is continuous, new interviews are conducted with audience and passers-by and these interviews are semi-real-time transcribed and fed into the system, so that wearers in the veils can trigger these stories, listen and read them.
In ElectroSmog for the first time a network of the Data-Veils interact with projections, continuous performance, interviews and transcription in several places at the same time. The project can also be followed on-line and the Data-Veils themselves are entirely network enabled (wifi and umts) they also contain a webcam that feeds images continuously from each location.’
Audience experience
Since they interacted with the portrait system (containing their own portrait) through the intimacy of the private veil space and the body touching, they felt like on the edge of ‘being physical and virtual’; and in a strange way connected with the people gazing at them.
A very hybrid meeting. It is wonderful to explore and offer an experience were the words to describe it still to be invented.
