“Sympoietic World-Making: Bridging Spaces through Telematic Performance and Multimedia Mixing” explores the integration of telematic technologies in art and performance, facilitated by the innovative use of the Novel NEXUS Interface for Multimedial Exploration.
Developed by Mycelium and the Telematic Performance Format Group at ZHdK, NEXUS is a large-scale tangible multi-user sensor-based interface designed for multimedia exploration across geographical distances.
Participants will be introduced to the technical and creative aspects of the NEXUS interface, including its design principles and the technology underlying its operation. Key features of the workshop include an introduction to the Telemersive Gateway, a MaxMSP-based peer-to-peer application essential for the operation of NEXUS. Participants will gain practical insights into configuring and utilizing this tool for telematic art projects.
The workshop will allow participants to actively engage with the embodied mixing interface NEXUS, understanding its operational framework and experiencing its capability to manipulate multimedia elements in real-time.
By connecting a physical space in Switzerland with the conference venue in Brisbane via telecommunication technologies, the workshop creates a unique environment for transcontinental artistic collaboration and communication.
Through hands-on activities, participants will explore how the NEXUS interface and their multimedia mixing engineers facilitate as switch performers the dynamic interplay between performers at remote locations, challenging normative roles and hierarchies in multimedia performances and productions.
The session emphasizes technology’s role in transforming narratives and fostering world-making as a critical place-making practice, rewiring contemporary practices of tele-conferencing and historical practices of manual telephone switching, jacking in. We are thus reimagining and reclaiming diverse temporal narratives of becoming-with telecommunication technologies, challenging western concepts of spacetimes.
The workshop involves establishing and experimenting with a set of rules — procedural, aesthetic, and political — to guide the processes of mediation and translation between remote locations. Participants engage in a world-making exercise that considers the interconnectedness of human, technological and material actors.
The goal of the workshop is to equip participants with basic skills and knowledge to implement telematic technologies in their creative endeavors, encouraging innovation in the creation of networked performance art.
