Telematic Practice and Research Discourses: Three practice-based research project case studies

Abstract

This Paper focuses on the production, documentation and preservation of the authors telematic practicebased research in the interactive media arts. This reflects a timely practice review with significant implications on the future of exhibiting and archiving the broad range of creative arts in this field. These fundamental research questions also have relevance across a number of practice based research fields including performance arts and the ephemeral nature of open-system interactive artworks. The objective of this paper is to propose research methods that will approach the question of how to accurately document and archive this transient creative practice that is so often reliant on its cultural and historic context. Since the early 90s my artistic practice has identified and questioned the notions of embodiment and disembodiment in relation to the interacting performer in telematic and telepresent art installations. At what point is the performer embodying the virtual performer in front of them? And have they therefore become disembodied by doing so? A number of interactive telematic artworks will be looked at in detail during this paper establishing case-study examples to answer these questions. Stemming from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz seminal work ‘Hole-in-Space’ to -----------’s telepresent experiments with ‘Telematic Dreaming’ and to the current emerging creative/critical discourse in ‘Second Life’ that polarizes fundamental existential questions concerning identity, the self, the ego and the (dis)embodied avatar. The preservation and documentation of this work is extremely problematic when we consider the innate issues of (dis)embodiment in relation to presence and intimacy, as experienced and performed in telematic and virtual environments. How can it become possible to reencounter a performance of dispersed and expanded bodies, multiple and interconnected identities, spectral representations and auras; in short, at hybrid bodies (/selves) made of flesh and digital technologies, and the intimate connections between them.