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"Head Nobody" |
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| "Head Nobody" emerged as a final project in my new genre arts class in Fall 2006. In the project, we created a large-scale public webchat in which passerbys could interact with a head that was detached from its own body, but whose body was still residing in the same room with it. Participants were instructed to give commands to the head, who would then relay the request to the body, also visible in the webchat as a separate entity. By the end of the performance, the body had been asked to shave the head's hair off and later, by another request, to bring the actual hair to the location where the audience was stationed--an act which strongly signified the bridging of two realms, physical and ethereal, and the particularly tense moment in the current culture. |
“Get Cloned” was a live interactive webchat performance broadcast from the Colorado State University Pueblo Fine Art Gallery to a remote location on the CSU campus. In the gallery was a large-scale rasterized photograph of the exact physical area of the campus landscape that would be obscured by the projection screen during the performance. When broadcast live, this backdrop created a surreal atmosphere, as if a slice of the landscape had been removed and was now being re-projected into place. Twelve collaborators, of differing ages and from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, waited off-camera with a large selection of clothing and accessories to be used during the performance. The webchat began with an emcee in the gallery asking for participants in a virtual cloning experience. Volunteers at the remote site used a public microphone to answer a series of questions about their individual characteristics and experiences. During the interview one of the twelve off-stage collaborators --the one who most resembled the volunteer--was quickly dressed to match the volunteer. Once this “clone” was created, he or she moved in front of the webcam and answered the same series of questions that had been posed to the volunteer, attempting to emulate the given responses as closely as possible. | ||
