The Presence Project

Paul Sermon is creating a new, site-specific telepresence work in Taipei, Taiwan. To enable this commission, Paul will be working in the studios at Taipei Artist's Village (TAV) until 6 May.

Gabriella Giannachi has begun a dialogue with Paul, published on the Presence Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/500, following the process of making the piece.

Paul writes:

Some images attached of the locations I have visited. The Chinese housing complex I spoke about is called Treasure Hill, this was a really inspiring space and several of the houses have been purchased by the city government and turned into artist studios/galleries.

The artists are working with a lot of found objects and using the space as living/working/studio/exhibition environments, turning one of the spaces into a bar also.

But in general I don't think it is possible to use the space for a media art installation, it's just not secure enough, it's also very damp and electrical supplies are not reliable.

But anyway - very inspiring. I'm also attaching a photo from The Huashan Culture Park I visited Wednesday to give you some idea of the scale of the space.

They also have some small studio/bedroom spaces here at Taipei Artists Village which I could use to produce an installation work which could draw some of the thoughts gathered from Treasure Hill. I will talk more about the concept emerging here in my next email.

I'm intrigued by your [Gabriella's] notion absentness in the telepresent space. In my work/notion nothing is absent but rather becoming redefined - the absence of touch is embodied in the expanded sense of sight. The same could be said for blind person - the absence of sight is embodied in the expanded sense of touch or sound. Can we expand this to cultural experience?

Over the next three months we will be following and documenting Paul's process.

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Early in the New Year we will begin documenting Paul Sermon’s development of a new commission for the opening of THEpUBLIC museum in West Bromwich, UK http://www.thepublic.com/.

Telematic Embrace will be a permanent installation in place from August 2006.

These images from Paul’s prospectus for the project are from Telematic Vision (1992), which inspires this new work.

Paul’s site-specific installations employ telematics to explore mutual interaction and user-determined narrative between remote participants.

Participants interact with others in physically dispersed sites by observing their own ‘human avatar’ representations in a telepresent space.

Paul describes how this is enabled:

Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology these divided audience participants enter a video installation and initially suppose they entering a passive space - sitting, standing or sometimes lying within it. Their presence within the space is recorded live on video camera and mapped in real-time, via a chroma-key video mixer, with an identical camera view of another participant in an identical installation space – combining two shots of live action by replacing a blue or green back drop in one image with the image of the other. The two spaces which can be any geographical distance apart are linked via a videoconference connection, making it possible to link and combine these telematic installations and their performing audiences between almost any location in the world.

These installations provoke an uncanny sense of presence in conflations between proximity and distance, intimacy and removal.

Paul argues that:

All technology is a development of language - a means of construction and interpretation of an environment. The definition of the virtual and real are all part of the same linguistic construct. Technology/language is not an apparatus or attachment of the body, but rather an extension of it.

For the user, remote participants come closer in a sense of presence divided between sites, actions and interactions.

Paul’s website is at http://www.paulsermon.org/

A context for this documentation of Paul’s work is already being developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/PaulSermon/Home

Images courtesy Paul Sermon.

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