Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance

Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance was a two-day international conference with performance evening organised and chaired by myself at the University of South Wales on the 11th and 12th of April 2013. Its purpose was to explore the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. How do networks as a site for performance provide opportunities for us as artists and performers? In particular how can we remotely collaborate, merge geographically separate places and times, reconfigure the space of performance and the relationship between artist and audience? The conference was initiated as part of my research and practice on networked art and with a view to revealing performative aspects within that practice. A mixture of delegates with differing research, practice, means and economic situations, attended representing a wide variety of performance arts. Artists performing at the conference in Wales performed with others (artists and audience) in England, France, Belgium, Italy, Singapore and the United States confirming that visual forms enabled a multitude of possibilities for artists to see, synchronise, collaborate and create at distance. Papers discussed issues concerning remoteness, artist’s performance methods and technological techniques were explored in depth and the network was considered in a number of ways as an enabling or limiting technology.