Performing Presence: From the Live to the Simulated

The Presence Project

What creates a sense of presence?

- the presence of a live performer ...

- the presence of the past ...

- in a memory ...

- in ruined remains ..

- the sense of 'being there' in an online community ...

- in a VR environment ...

Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi in Exeter, Mel Slater in London and myself will be exploring these questions with performance artists

Tim Etchells | Bella Merlin | Vayu Naidu | Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes | Fiona Templeton | Phillip Zarrilli

Lynn Hershman Leeson | Gary Hill | Tony Oursler | Blast Theory | The Builders Association | Tilda Swinton | Ken Goldberg | Paul Sermon | Andrea Zapp

in

• a series of workshops

• experimental documentation

• joint productions, where practice becomes research

At University College London we will be using a CAVE to simulate environments, performances and encounters in experimental exploration and behavioral research into matters of presence [link]

In Exeter Laura Cull and Stefanie Kuhn will be researching presence and developing an online bibliographic resource.

Here at Stanford we are running the online collaboratory a research workshop on the politics of presence (funded by the Mellon Foundation), and are working with Lynn Hershman on an art installation called Life Squared in the virtual world Second Life (funded by the Langlois Foundation).

Several of my own research projects intersect with the Presence Project - particularly where I am exploring documentation and mediation - aspects of historiography, the archive, chorography, archaeography, the presence of the past ...

See, for example, overviews of my work at

Tomorrow's archive

Practice as research

Historiography

Experiments in (new) media

The [link] Wallenberg Foundation is funding my research to assess the potential of the participatory social software we are using for the Presence Project collaboratory (the wiki at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/collaboratory) - see Co-creating cultural heritage

Links

The Collaboratory - [link]

The Stanford Research Workshop - [link]

Life Squared - [link]

Exeter home page - [link]

Full project outline - [link]

Project members - [link]

News

Latest from The Presence Project [RSS]:

• Lynn Hershman Leeson: A Real + Second Life Symposium
• Documenting The Builders Association, CONTINUOUS CITY
• Lynn Hershman Leeson, Autonomous Agents in Manchester
• Analysing CAVE experiment 1
• Presence Interviews online

Funding and support

The Presence Project has received an award of £275k (about $500k) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. This is to cover secretarial support at Exeter University, two research assistants, a VR programmer at UCL, workshops, travel and the organization of a conference in the UK in 2009. The award runs from 2005-2009.

Exeter University has contributed £3K (about $5.5K) to the costs of the bibliographic web site and in 2004-5 provided £6.9K (about $12K) to release Giannachi and Kaye from 50% of their teaching in support of preparation and development of funding bids. Further funds of £15K (about $28K) have been made available to the project at Exeter under Full Economic Costing to support the time commitment of the Exeter Principal Investigators. UCL is funding documentation (through video) of the CAVE simulations and contributing toward the operational costs of the CAVE (@ £385 per day for up to three weeks - total about $12).

My Metamedia Lab is providing basic support for the Presence Project collaboratory, infrastructure for the Life Squared project, and for some documentation of artists' work.

I am seeking

• support for a more secure web-based collaboratory and social software (new server equipment and documentation input),
• image capture and scanning equipment (to complement what is available in the Metamedia Lab and to enable time-proof documentation)
• post-doctoral research assistance (to enable primary documentation of the case studies and to prepare for the planned 2010 colloquium and exhibition at Stanford),
• funding for building a collection of documents of artists' works in Green Library, perhaps as part of Stanford's new Digital Repository
• funding and support for collaborative work with Lynn Hershman in Life Squared and beyond
• travel expenses for Stanford people and artists (to the CAVE, workshops and case studies in UK and the US and to Stanford),
• funding and support for the planned final exhibition and colloquium at Stanford in 2010.

Interest has been expressed by Stanford faculty Peggy Phelan, Richard Martin, Paula Ebron, Fred Turner (collaboration already underway on the Mellon Workshop "Critical Studies in New Media"), Jon Bender (for SHC) and Henry Lowood (collaborating now on Life Squared.