Today was Day 2 of Resonate festival [held in Belgrade April 13. – 18.]
First three days – called LIVE are mostly about workshops, making projects, and performances.
I took a walk around the “house” of festival – lovely building of Kinoteka (Serbian film archive).
…. and listened a bit of performance Lost Fret
and talk of Bob Ostertag… “Composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, kayak instructor “- Bob is very charismatic and it was nice to listen to him.
He raised a few interesting questions about the LIVE performance today, like What is definition of live performance today when we have people on stage staring at the screens “performing”. ?
His definition would be something like this (as I can remember):
If a person is present and there is a possible moment of improvisation then it’s LIVE performance.
The next question was even more interesting:
The question of what’s live and question of what’s ALIVE?!
And that is true, considering that even in the Pop culture we don’t necessary have ALIVE performers, but holographic projections or humanoid robots – likeYamaha’s HRP-4C who perform “live” on stage, obviously with less uncanny valley effect.
But cyber-performance (or digital performance) is not a new art form. It started from 1990.
Stelarc made series of performances with digital media, famous Desktop Theater made network performances… Actually there are many artists and groups that experimented with new media and digitalisation of body, stage and audience in last 20 years: cyberformance companies The Plaintext Players (existing since 1994) and Avatar Body Collision, and the purpose-built cyberformance software UpStage.
I also liked this sound automatic electro – installation at Resonate today. It was the result of workshop and it was performing music LIVE in the hall . You can see/hear video below.
