MindTouch by Camille Baker, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute:

The intention of this project is to contribute to performance technology studies by investigating ‘liveness and presence’ within the context of a specific networked, mobile media performance research project, currently underway, in order to uncover any new understandings that may have emerged from the use of new wireless and mobile technologies.

This project explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments.

This project involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of archived of streamed and/or archived video clips created by video enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during a live visuals performance(s). The event or events will form a performative, collaborative, non-linear narrative montage or remix, that will possibly be streamed back out to anyone’s phone and the internet, and then archived. These events will be starting in London, UK in July + October, Vancouver in Aug/Sept, and possibly Perth and Asia next year.

Participants are considered the performers / collaborators in creating clips for several live’mixed? events and a unique performances from the mobile video archive, to help type of collective consciousness. The participants invited to participate in the video blogs are asked to explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional / affective senses and dream states, embodiment, communication, using of mobile media tools to express themselves non-verbally.

This research explores mobile video/media on phones for their immediacy, low quality – imperfectness, but spontaneity, at the speed of thought – with its rewriting, superimposing, and remixing of ideas, flashes and clashes of images and emotion, layering of meaning and stream of consciousness and equivalent – or simulation of telepathy and collective, if chaotic intelligence.

This project explores concepts such as: live versus simulated/virtual, liveness, presence, internal / non-verbal expression, body-machine interfaces and sensors, media art and performance practices that investigate role of performer versus the experience of the viewer, the participation of the audience in networked mobile media performances, current explorations in mobile media performance practices, social aspects and site-specificity of networked performance events, networks, locative media and wireless devices in media performance practices, live / performance art history and practice, VJing or live cinema practice, media art reception and interactivity, social mobility practices and more. More >>