During March, I’m a “virtual artist in residence” at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, at the invitation of Randall Packer. He, in association with Furtherfield, is organising an online symposium titled “Art of the Networked Practice”, and in my residency I will work with his students to create a cyberformance for the symposium’s opening.

So far, the work has involved discussions and thinking; planning three one-hour online workshops with the students; and writing a description of the performance that has yet to be created. This is the description:

“we r now[here] is a cyberformance about nowhere and somewhere: the “nowhere” of the internet becomes “now” and “here” through our virtual presence. Approaching the virtual somewhere from a physical nowhere, we glimpse streets, public transport, corridors, doorways – physical representation of data packets and pixels on the move – until the audio-visual streams converge into a single “now-here” in the somewhere of the internet.”

My inspiration came from the title, which I’ve inherited from Annie Abrahams who thinks it could be attributed to something Curt Cloninger said; and also from the concept of the symposium itself, an online event which will bring together people from all kinds of different situations around the world. Like the CyPosium before it, and cyberformance in its myriad forms, this symposium will create a temporary virtual “somewhere” where we will congregate to share and exchange. Through the cyberformance with Randall’s students, we will explore the idea of making somewhere out of nowhere, something out of nothing. Our presence, words and actions will call into being – not exactly a space, but definitely a “here”; a “here” of our own design and imagining – which is how the internet should be, isn’t it?

Today I got my log-in for Adobe Connect, which is the platform that we’ll be using for the performance – and it is also the site for the whole symposium. I don’t have much experience yet with this particular tool, so it’s going to be interesting to create a performance in it. Adobe Connect is designed for online presentations, conferences and teaching, & it has lots of interesting functionality, but there will be things that I’ll want to do that I can’t. I’m mindful of the last month’s discussion on -empyre- about tools and technologies, where we discussed the tools we use and why, the importance of open source and artist involvement in tool design, and so on. I talked about UpStage, which is artist-led and open source so theoretically we can develop in the way that meets our artistic needs; but it’s also independent and unfunded, so progress is very slow. But in a world where things are changing so fast it’s impossible to keep up, slow can be a good thing. Also in the -empyre- discussion, people reminisced about the early days of the internet when it felt like anything was possible. We really were creating something from nothing, making things up as we went along and working to our own imaginative design plans.

I’m curious to see what kind of imaginative design plans the NTU students will bring to “we r now[here]”. Watch this “space” …