"In the future, will the richness and diversity of your life
online exceed that of your life in the physical world?"
D.A. Solomon
Saturday , 1:34 pm. I have just logged off my computer after spending
some time chatting, transmitting and receiving visual fragments with
my friend Ulf. The meeting took place in a private cyber room using
ivisit, a videoconferencing software. He lives in Norway, I live in
Toronto. Since acquiring my modem and ISP account a little over a year
ago, my involvement within the Web community has grown from sending
the occasional e-mail, to participating in live, on-line text and video-based
chat sessions.
I have observed that within this
domain the languages used for communicating are slightly different from
those used in face-to-face conversations. There is a restructuring of
body language and the written word facial expressions and gestures are
encoded into written text, and some phrases are abbreviated, possibly
to account for slow typing speeds. Actions and expressions turn into
stage directions similar to those in a play. Visually, there is careful
framing with the camera. The way that you present yourself, what is
being broadcast, becomes your digital persona.
Debra Solomon and Amanda Steggell, two artists
currently working in digital environments, have been instrumental in
helping me to understand and develop my digital persona. Both women
produce interactive videoconferencing performances. Solomon (the_living)
and Steggel (M@ggie) explore the existence of the on-line
body to illustrate the many ways that digital personae can be represented
and perceived.

In 1997, Debra Solomon created
her digi-persona, the_living, a purely digital body whose psychological
makeup is based solely upon her interactions. The_living, considered
a separate entity by Solomon, interacts with her audience by
holding mobile CU-SeeMe and radio broadcasts, providing a forum for
relevant issues concerning on-line existence, mind uploading, cryogenics,
transhumanism and the use of body language within a videoconferencing
environment. Occasionally these broadcasts take place in challenging
physical situations for example, from the bottom of a pool, or rowing
around one of the canals in Amsterdam illustrating the unlimited possibilities
within the digital world and the many ways that we can be connected.
According to Solomon, "I already have a life, and my priority
this year consists of providing the visual and narrative for [my] digi-persona,
the_living. Her life consists only of what I give her to live
plus her interaction with others on-line."
As her project progresses, Solomon
will allow the_living to exist twenty-four hours a day, seven
days a week. By embarking on a global journey to the "birthplaces
of digital mythology," and by broadcasting from these mythological
sites, the_living will be able to contextualize her on-line interactions
further.

Since 1995, Motherboard (aka
choreographer Amanda Steggell and musical director Per Platou)
have created performances which relate to digital pop culture and explore
the interactivity and sometimes seamless connection of the digital and
real-time body.
In M@ggie's Love Bytes, three
dancers and a female mouse make up M@ggie, a persona who interacts
with her on-line audience through sound, text and videoconferencing
while also performing live within a public space. She is accompanied
by her male musicians, Nood, and a whole bunch of shareware.
Motherboard's recent project, Switch
Bitch, focuses on the definition, of cyberfeminism, or rather, its
current ambiguous state. Drawing upon a years research into the many
interpretations of cyberfeminism, Switch Bitch is a live event
where the audience is offered several simultaneous interpretations of
the cyberfemme through a real-time mixing of performance with interview
footage. The on-line dweller is provided with a selection of links leading
to cyberfemme sites (Orlan, Sandy Stone, Venus Matrix,
and others).
Since writing this article I have
discovered that more and more artists are using the internet as their
performance playground. As with projects by Motherboard and the_living,
the on-line body is redefined through videoconferencing performances
or other live-internet events. The relationship between the audience
and those that are performing is intimate yet detached: everybody hides
behind their digital personae. The line between the audience and the
performer becomes very blurred and everyone ultimately performs for
each other.
Michelle
(Micha) Teran
is a Toronto artist.
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