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 Myrirorama

 AmbientTV.net
 Pixelache Festival

Triptychon: live locative media and dance performance
by AmbientTV.net
Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, 4 April 2004

The audience at the Kiasma Theatre was led all the way down the steps of the tiered seating area and invited to take their places inside a hexagonal veil-like tent raised on the stage. A performer equipped with a GPRS capable hand-held computer and GPS receiver left the building on a walk. As the lights dimmed, the semi-transparent walls of the tent became a myriad of projections, the stepped auditorium a stage for a dancer dressed in white and the bip-bip-bip sound of a pedestrian crossing signal was heard, introducing an evocative live sound-track.

The walk, framed between the steps of Helsinki's Parliament building and the steps of the Lutheran Cathedral, also formed the framework of the 45-minute show as text messages from the walker, along with the positions reported by the GPS system, were mapped in real time in a visual display. The live messages from the walker emerged from the context of layers of archived walks and the earlier walkers’ messages, and threaded their way through a forest of texts. Crossing the three-dimensional images generated this way, were live-mixed video footage and closed circuit relay of the dancer’s movements outside the tent. The sightlines of the dancer seen through the tent-screens, her shadow and her image crossed the many sightlines of the audience seated at will in the tent rather than in rows in a theatre. The movements of the walkers in the city, tagged with their messages, mediated by the technology, became the cues for the dancer, interpreting her own space with the movements of her body.

AmbientTV.net’s interest in so-called ‘locative media’ (mobile communications and positioning technology) stems from earlier ‘telejams’ which linked performers and situations in different cities with live messaging, music and video. The Ambients draw from the traditions of psychogeography the notion of a spatial encoding of narrative and its subsequent unveiling. The complex visual and sound environment created in Triptychon is the emergence of language from media: the reciprocity between ‘objective’ data and ‘subjective’ interpretation. It mirrors the urban experience as a myriad of crossings.

Triptychon also emerges from and tends towards another locative-performative piece, now developing under the working title Myriorama (formerly FlipFlop). In this respect, Triptychon has been a valuable research loop, allowing the Ambients to develop software and hardware solutions, but above all to develop the critical approaches to media and subjective focus that stop it becoming a gadget-piece.

Myriorama will premiere this summer.

Anthony Auerbach, London, April 2004

Triptychon: live locative media and dance performance
by AmbientTV.net (Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, David Muth)
for Pixelache Festival 2004: Audiovisual Architecture, Helsinki
with: Hanna Ylitepsa (choreography and dance), Gavin Starks (roaming narrator), Camalo Gaskin (costume and tent design) and featuring walks through Helsinki by John Hopkins, Mariko Montpetit, Nick Grindell, Hermanni Ylitepsa, Voytec Mejor and others