The Presence Project

Human Avatars is a networked media art installation by Andrea Zapp, with a soundtrack by Vini Reilly of Manchester’s Durutti Column.

The installation was launched in Manchester, UK, in October 2005 as part of the exhibition ‘Storyrooms,’ curated by Andrea at the Museum of Science and Industry.

‘Storyrooms’ explores interactive networks, media art and installation through work by Susan Collins, UK; Paul DeMarinis, Stanford, USA; Ken Goldberg, USA; Paul Sermon, UK; Cornelia Sollfrank, D; Tan Teck Weng, Malaysia; and Andrea, D/UK.

In early November, Gabriella (Giannachi) and I will meet Andrea and Paul Sermon to discuss extended documentations of their work beginning in year 1 or 2 of the Presence Project.

We plan to document and respond to ‘Storyrooms’ as a context for this work, focussing on the performance of presence through interactive and performative installations exploring telepresence and communications systems.

In Andrea’s work, the occupation of places and interaction with others becomes complex and dispersed.

For Human Avatars, visitors becomes subject to a series of live, interactive mediations, in which their presence becomes the object of attention for other remote visitors, whose watching is fed back and amplified through the installation.

Andrea describes the piece:

Human Avatars creates a visual dialogue between real and virtual participants on two networked stages:

Visitors in the exhibition space discover a small wooden hut, which they are invited to enter. A live image of their body inside is projected into a remote model version of the hut, complete with model furniture, where other visitors can make contact with the tiny moving figures by peeping through a small window. Yet unaware that a second camera inside displays their peering faces back on the window of the big shed, with their eyes now overshadowing the participants inside.

The architecture and the scenario appear very playful, but the immediate interactive experience is controversial, once the voyeuristic strategy behind the idyllic backdrop becomes evident - indirectly hinting at rather ambivalent and melancholic side effects of surveillance and visual control as an intrinsic part of media and entertainment.

Andrea’s work engages with the complexities of presence formed in an interleaving of real and virtual action, meeting and place.

We will begin developing this work on the Collaboratory more fully shortly.

Andrea’s website is at http://www.azapp.de/

The ‘Storyrooms’ exhibition is at http://www.storyrooms.net/