During lockdown, I stumbled across a video and article that prompted a timely reflection of my early work with telepresence in live performance. It was timely as, in the midst of the catastrophic, we were going through a paradigm shift in the way we communicate, shaped by a technological application that two artists pioneered as far back as the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those artists were Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz of the Electronic Café International.
Kit and Sherrie opened the first Electronic Café in the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California in 1988. For the next 10 years, the ECI lab was the site of electronic networking instigations that contributed significantly to the canon of collaborative telecommunications arts and telepresence in live performance. A branch of ECI was sited at The Kitchen in New York where, with Marc Boothe (founder of B3 Media), I first met with Kit & Sherrie’s team to embark on a collaboration between the ECI lab and Digital Diaspora, a collective of Black British artists founded by Marc and artists including Gary Stewart (latterly of dubmorphology), Keith Piper, Janice Cheddi and myself.
One night in April 1995 that collaboration materialised as the first trans-Atlantic teleconferenced performance event, the Digital Slam. The irony of the world entering a state where, for human interaction, telepresence all but entirley replaced physical presence less than a month before the quarter-century anniversay of that event is not lost on me.
A Hole In Space
The video (below) that I stumbled across, ironically in between Zoom calls, as we were about to enter another lockdown that December, was from Kit & Sherrie’s Satellite Arts Project, Hole-in-Space.
From November 12 to 14, 1980, two life-size screens installed by the artists – one outside a department store in Los Angeles, another outside the Lincoln Center in New York City – were connected via a live two-way satellite link. Initially unannounced, the installation allowed passers by in both locations to communicate in real time. In the artists’ words, the audiences/participants “see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk” to “preview the sociopolitical contexts of new ways of being-in-the-world.”
While bulky teleconferencing hardware using ISDN telecommunication lines in corporate board rooms and rentable meeting room facilities were prevalent in the ’90s, it took a near world-stopping pandemic for these “new ways of being-in-the-world” to manifest two decades into the 21st century. Today we find the observations, reactions and musings heard in this video cute, but there is something significant happening in Hole-in-Space that is still lacking in the average post-2020 video call. This lies in the pulic siting of the work, always on, it’s 1:1 life-size nature manages to engender a communal experience. Something that the familiar desktop video call boxes, whose order is rarely mirrored for all users, fails to replicate. Additionally, Kit & Sherrie’s installation manages merge space and/or generate new space that causes (at least some) participants to question where [they] “are right now”.
Telepresence in live performane – the Digital Slam
It’s in the delocalisation and abstraction of space that I became interested after pulling off the Digital Slam with Digital Diaspora in 1995. Digital Diaspora was formed out of the imperative for an African diasporic intervention in the so called “digital revolution” of the 1990s. We recognised that buried in the discourse around cultural democracy and the ambition for non-hegemonic modes of communication, lay the potential for the persistence of marginalisation along racial lines. And yet, interactivity, which lay at the centre of cultural applications of emergent digital technologies, as a creative praxis, was not new to us. The retention and influence of cultural practices rooted in their traditions provides black diasporic and first nations peoples with unique and familiar insights into interactivity.
At the time I was particularly interested in the idea of migration as the driving force for the dynamics of culture and that in the late 20th century, electronic migration had impacted these dynamics through TV, radio and then potentially the Internet. So by connecting stages at The Kitchen in New York and the ICA in London, I wanted to begin to investigate how, through compressing time and space, we might be able to isolate and model that process of syncretism at a specific moment. These were high ideals for an event that would inevitably be overwhelmed by novelty and spectacle. Ultimately the Digital Slam became best known as what MTV called “the world’s first trans-Atlantic jam session”, where musicians, DJs, poets and video artists (co-curated by Marc Boothe and Greg Tate) geographically separated by the Atlantic ocean, were able to collaborate on performances in real time.
The 5th Province – Samhain
Fast forward to 1997 and the same technologies and methods were applied to a collaboration my newly launched company, Hyperjam and Irish digital media company 5th Province. This project provided a specific theme and focus that allowed a manifestly deeper exploration of telepresence and delocalised space.
Samhain (pronounced so-w-an) is an ancient pre-Celtic Irish festival which marks the transition from the fourth to the first quarter of the year. It coincides with the originally North-American celebration of Hallowe’en. The Irish quarter years correspond to each of the four provinces of Ireland. Traditon has it that during Samhain one is in the fifth province, in neither one time-space or another. Geographically, the fifth province – where the other four meet – is marked by Ail na Mireann, the “Stone of Divisions”, also known as the “Cat Stone”, on the Hill of Uisneach in County Westmeath where the most significant spiritual celebrations of Samhain occur each year.
With artists (including Talvin Singh, Afro Celts Soundsystem and Project 23) located in Dublin and London, we experimented with configuring the stage in each venue in a ‘V’ shape formation with a life-size screen forming one side of the V with a camera at eye level pointing at the musicians lined up as the other side of the V. This allowed the artists to make eye contact with each other and the implied extension of the lines lines drawing the audience into the space. We even placed a laser at the apex of the ‘V’ projecting a cone of light out into the audience – just to help the perception on a bit!
In an article I wrote in 1999 for Futuresonic (now Future Everything), entitled The Space In Between, I discussed the experience musicians have of occupying a sonic and emotional space that the music they make together generates. In keeping with the idea of Samhain, we wanted to test this notion under conditions in which the musicians occupy separate physical spaces.
Samhain also presented an opportunity to revisit Kit and Sherrie’s Hole-in-Space by mounting gauze material on the dance floors of each space with cameras behind the gauzes capturing the audiences dancing in front of the gauzes. The images from each location rear projected onto the gauze in the other. Throughout the night, dancers lined up in front of the gauze screens dancing with and waving at their counterparts on the other side of the connection. To quote some audience members, for one “magical night” audiences were “lost in space and time”.
Telepresence and Virtual Reality at NOW ’98
A year later, in 1998, as part of an artist’s residency at the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab, I got involved with virtual reality (VR) for the first time. Through a commission from the lab, we investigated the idea of visualising this “third space”. The same teleconferencing technologies over ISDN deployed on both the Digital Slam and Samhain were used for an event in Nottingham’s NOW festival.
The artists (techno pioneer Carl Craig in Detroit and drum ‘n bass progenitors 4 Hero in Nottingham) also shared their local streams of MIDI data (triggers for their synthesizers and samplers) over a wide area network (WAN) in real time. That data was used to manipulate virtual cameras through a 3D rendered virtual environment projected around and immersing the audience. The 3D/VR artist worked off the same stimulus as the musicians.
The audience was taken on a journey or ‘fly through’ a digitally rendered virtual world as they danced, immersed in what was now a visually as well as audibly perceptible ‘third space’.
Telepresent Legacies and Futures
All of these projects relied on a mix of public arts and commercial sponsorship. Corporate sponsors were as much concerned with R&D as they were with brand association. It was futurism in which academics and commerce alike saw telepresence substituting for physical presence in a range of human endeavours. It’s unsertain how long it might have taken for that future to materialise without the accelerant of the COVID19 pandemic.
In the ’90s we struggled with the relatively large amount of bandwidth required to telematically transfer audio and video in real time. Today’s broadband and video codecs that have significantly reduced the file sizes and data transfer rates of even higher quality video represent a significant leap. Yet on more recent projects in the second decade of the 21st century, reducing latency (signal delay) sufficiently to enable real time collaboration for performance art work, in particular music, remains a challenge.
For the events described above, ISDN provided point-to-point (peer) connections. ISDN has since been replaced by the high-speed Internet or ‘broadband’ for achieving fast connections. However, without expensive peer-to-peer connections, it’s difficult to predict the (indirect) route our data travels from point A to point B. Latency remains an issue as data potentially travels the world before reaching its destination, with other local factors such as how long it takes to capture, encode/decode and process video and audio also coming into play. Modern conveniences such as webcam auto-focus, motion tracking and video call background replacement also render the applications that we most commonly use today for work and socialising unsuitable for sophisticated real time collaborative performance work.
As we continue to investigate the aesthetic, cultural and social impacts of telepresence in live performance, technical challenges persist, imbuing the work with the same sense of pioneering creativity that Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz embodied in the 1980s-90s. The COVID19 pandemic has re-invigorated this research and I continue to be drawn to it.
UPDATE: An installation reconstructing the Hole-In-Space event using documentation footage featured as part of MoMA’s Signals: How Video Transformed the World exhibition, New York City, March 5–July 8, 2023.