Artists Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell made history in 1994 when they orchestrated what many believe to be the first live online performance event in history.
The Park Bench performances involved planting email and video-conferencing kiosks in New York City subway stations with the goal of encouraging people from diverse neighborhoods to communicate with one another.
Art critics at the Village Voice considered Park Bench so innovative that they put the project on a published list last year of the "51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" of the last couple of centuries.
This summer, Sobell and Hartzell launched Web Seance, a project they see as a natural outgrowth of Park Bench. It's a series of live online performances (or is it social experiments?) that attempt to explore the phantom-like qualities of the online world.
The Web Seance project was commissioned by the Banff Centre for the Arts, an arts institution in Alberta, Canada, known for its support of new media artists. The third installment takes place Wednesday, at 3 p.m. CMT, and the fourth takes place 28 July.
Sobell said Web Seance deals with the same essential concepts as those explored in Park Bench.
"Park Bench was about breaking ghetto boundaries, bridging communication gaps, using technology to bring us closer to respectful understanding of our differences, unfettered by bureaucracy through art," said Sobell. "Web Seance is still yet another instance of these precepts."
Diverse elements are used to create eerily beautiful, but perhaps nonsensical, multimedia collages that appear on the Web Seance home page during the live performances.
The performances take place at both the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff and at the office of Suzerain, a New York Web development firm. They involve live audiences gathered around computer terminals and a large projection of the Web Seance home page.
The key elements of the Web collages are "brainwave drawings," live heartbeats (of live participants) streamed via RealProducer, and a question-and-answer interface backed by a chatterbot programmed to respond to certain words and text patterns typed in by those who log onto the Web Seance site during performances.
A shareware program called dadadodo collects stories that Web participants submit and deconstructs the text. The program then borrows phrases from each to create a series of new, grammatically correct collaborative sentences, meant to read like a narrative of sorts scrolling across a segment of the screen. The mysterious brainwave drawings look like abstract art, and consist of a live participant's brainwaves that are read with electrodes and converted to graphics by a device called the Brainmaster.
The brainwave graphic is integrated with video of the brainwave artist's face, chosen from a live audience at Banff, and streamed onto the Web Seance home page, where it meets the video of another brainwave artist at Suzerain. These two video streams come together in Shockwave, where they are underlaid by constantly changing images of glowing, multiplying orbs or an image of growing moss.
Whichever graphic is used, its growth in onscreen size increases with the number of online visitors who log onto the Web Seance home page during a performance. Each visitor is also represented by an IP number, which pops onscreen as they log on.
"In showing the IP numbers of Web participants, we're stating the authenticity of the piece's interactivity," says Hartzell. "And in attributing participants' written contributions to their IP numbers, the piece comments on the nature of identity, as seen by the medium. We're very interested in the relation between individual and collective identity."
During the 16 June performance, 60 unique IP numbers represented online participants, and during the 30 June performance, that figure jumped to 90.
"It's so illogical that it's very exciting," says Perry Bard, a New York City artist and member of the international online art collective known as Virtual Revolutions. Bard was physically present during a Web Seance rehearsal in New York in early June and later logged onto the Web Seance site for the 16 June performance.
"If I had logged on and wasn't aware of the processes involved, I probably wouldn't have gleaned the same experience," says Bard. "In the end it was beautiful on the screen, but to me, the process is actually more exciting than whatever is put out."
