Since its introduction, software designed to enable online collaboration has been targeted toward businesses, the only market willing to pay for buggy product and hoping to avoid steep travel expenses. But while Lotus Notes and NetMeeting have yet to make good on their groupware gestalt, a two companies are now tailoring their collaboration products to transform artists into de facto R&D departments.
With the introduction of new software - Lucent's Persyst, to be released this fall, and Res Rocket Surfer's DRGN, unveiled two weeks ago at the Intel New Music Festival - actors are transforming into avatars and musicians are tuning their MIDI sound files under the promise of a seamless, polyphonous jam session.
With a new spin on "stage-to-screen," the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater, an avant-garde New York troupe, has brought together the Yale School of Drama and St. Petersburg Academy for a joint October production of Gogol's Inspector General - but the rehearsal process has been largely conducted in a public, virtual theater. (Access is available only during business hours.) Using Lucent's Montage, an experimental application which allows for 32 separate video feeds on one monitor, and Persyst, initially designed as interface for a virtual classroom, the Gertrude Stein Theater effectively skirted the need to own a brick-and-mortar version.
"We've actually made a choice to not take actual real estate ... because the idea was to [prove] that theater production can be done entirely on the Web," says co-founder Cheryl Faver. "Lucent provides the building material, we're the architects, and Yale is the first school that we've booked."
During rehearsals, a live link is maintained with Montage to the Russian theater, and the actors perform for each other before a projector screen. Director David Chambers says the first lesson for online collaboration is "be patient." "With a rapid gesture, you're only getting three or four frames per second, so you have to mark that in," says Chambers. "For the actor on the receiving end of the slap, they just have to assume the slap."
With Persyst, the troupe was able to replicate the backstage environment, including a costume shop, reading room, even the prototypical "green room" for postings, schedules, and socializing (including real-time chat). Because the software was intended to allow a teacher to call up notes and lesson plans, the Gertrude Stein group uses it to present archival film footage, period costumes, and even director's notes.
In critical ways, Gogol's renowned work - and specifically V. E. Meyerhold's radical 1926 production of it - makes for an ideal candidate for online experimentation, says Faver. As a response to social mechanization, Meyerhold's "bio-mechanical" approach broke the performer's body movement into discrete actions to echo the gearworks of machines. As Faver describes it, the jerky, fractured performance seems a clear precursor to the low frame-per-second transmission on CU-SeeMe cameras.
By comparison, Res Rocket Surfer's DRGN (pronounced "dragon"), a composition and performance software for musicians, operates "a little faster than Quake online," says Res Rocket Surfer's head of software development, Aric Rubin. The company, created entirely by musicians, hopes to create an enormous, international community of musicians by baiting them with the chance to busk digitally.
For a US$14.95 monthly subscription fee, users can select between public recording studios, rollicking jam sessions, or MOO-like chats. To play in the studios, musicians must use MIDI instruments or traditional instruments rigged up for MIDI protocol translation. Inside the studio, each musician, represented by an avatar, can either play along in real time or perfect their part locally and add it to the mix later on.
By opening up the jam session to a global drop-in audience, Res Rocket Surfer wants to push improvisation to the next level, says Rubin. Artists that compose using DRGN will walk right into a massive hybrid of styles, Rubin describes - the same explosive mix that created soul from gospel and pop, or salsa from African and Spanish music. As Rubin says, the most interesting thing you can confront is that "cusp moment" when styles collide.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
