~~~translocal development ~~~~

In the performance All Of Us [girls] Have Been Dead For So Long (so far having two successful tryouts), I would like to work on integrating the digital projected scenography in order for it to be interactive with the performner, and operated at via the networked level via KeyWorx software in order to explore translocal communication & new narrative architectures.

KeyWorx is a Multi-User Cross Media Synthesizer - a distributed application that allows multiple players to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds and text within a shared realtime environment. As an instrument it allows communities of players to dynamically control and modify all aspects of digitized media in a collaborative performance.

Theatrical tension between the textual projections from elsewhere that manifest as the girl and her active presence moves through these hidden inscriptions in the space which appear on her body. A women is exploring non-contiguous states, different selves, times & spaces, because of the subject of the work makes sense to explore these new translocal containers for stories and narratives in digital culture and performance.

The idea of ‘translocal’ means that someone may be either local or non-local but still ‘connected’ via the Net, this communication/ patch will be projected onto the stage. These days we want to remain in close contact with those in remote communities, people who are unable to physically be present and are able to via access to the computer. The idea translocal scenography goes a step further and explores the theme of teleportation. The girl is able to access stories that have hitherto been circulated, unspoken words and unfinished business, the subjugated knowledge’s of people. Lance Strate discussed how in the virtual world distinctions between past, present, and future fade, and our sense of times passage becomes distorted,

“The sense of temporal dislocation in cybertime is a key characteristic of the experience of computing, whether it is compared to religious epiphany, drug-induced hallucination, or the dream state. Cybertime is in some ways a form of sacred time, a mythic time or dreamtime (Kirk, 1974). And while it has become commonplace to compare the experiencing of audiovisual media to the act of dreaming, no other media provide the same sense of active personal presence as the computer, no other media allow us to construct and encounter other versions of ourselves: dream selves. (Lance Strate: Experiencing Cybertime: Computing as Activity and Event)”

The work deals directly with social networks, intimacy over distance, online presence and synchronous communication. The work is currently at the stage that during the performance I personally operate and programme a patch that is a live buzzing floor with hidden messages, that appear on my body as I move into a particular space or zone [this was one aspect of the performance]. Image of the words that are layered under moving lines [the computers Random Access Memory] are projected via a video beamer onto the floor, these are be revealed when I would trigger them with my body or prop in the space.

I want this live scenography operated by someone via the network, making a translocal connection. There is a live and online element, where text emerges from a physical presence elsewhere. Therefore, the project will explore the networked connected body in a collaborative event real-time text play. The physical space merges with virtual-space. The interaction of the performing bodies, physical and translocally transform the media, text and space.
e.g. - a woman is sitting in “Sydney” she is involved in responding to a live video stream of the performance, via her keyboard/computer and software, her text is projected into the local space of the performer in “Frankfurt”, but operated by her computer in Sydney, which creates the live scenography of the space but gives the impression of another dimension.

Artistic statement about the content [behind the concept]- Nancy Mauro-Flude
It is our great misfortune that many people and events bequeath no written histories, or often they are represented in over simplified narratives. All we really have are minute fragments, bits of evidence and signs in the cracks on the street -the interstices of the world, these spaces are sacred, but it seems to me that the profound effervescence of these micro worlds are often forgotten. . There are fewer free, raw undeveloped spaces where one can let their imagination run free, without being the victim of a great television producer. Some subjugated personal histories and people who existed in these in-between, virtual spaces, that I find need circulating, which I subtlety refer to in this work:
*Hecate (or 'Hekate'): Queen of the witches is an ancient and misunderstood Goddess. Finding the 'real' Hekate is a complex task, we learn very little about Her from Ancient Greek sources, and their conception of divinity was almost certainly very different from ours. Hekate is intrinsically ambivalent and polymorphous. She straddles conventional boundaries and elides definition."
*One of the Dead Girls in my Family: My Great-great grandmother Professor Allan, who in 1877 was The Celebrated Magician of the Age, performed 'the most wonderful 'SLEIGHT - OF - HAND TRICKS' coupled with vaudevillian routines. She was the first Lady Professor in Tasmania.
*QUEEN TRUGANINI: On May 7, 1876, Truganini, the last full-blood Black person in Tasmania, died at seventy-three years of age. A Coloniser had stabbed her mother to death. Colonials kidnapped her sister. Two European Settlers drowned her intended husband in her presence, while his murderers raped her. Twenty-five lashes were stipulated for Europeans convicted of tying aboriginal Tasmanian women to logs and burning them with firebrands, or forcing a woman to wear the head of her freshly murdered husband on a string around her neck and still the current Australian prime minister will not acknowledge these events.” Truganini's numerous personal sufferings typify the tragedy of the ethnic minority groups and other marginalised people of Tasmania as a whole. "Don't let them cut me up," she begged the doctor as she lay dying. After her burial, Truganini's body was exhumed, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum and remained on display until 1947. Finally, in 1976--the centenary years of Truganini's death, despite the museum's objections, her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.
This form of theatre making is deeply embedded in the particular lived experience of the performer ancestors and sharpens the view of intimacy over distance between human and computer. The scenography and the work as a whole allow her to constantly play with time and space in the landscape of the imagination. In this performance, the girl is seen to be in the present but shifts to the past and shift back to present.

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