The 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance

Released 9 December 2012

Testing 1 2, 1 2, 1 2
the 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance

Having enjoyed a week-long retrospective programme of remounted shows from the previous five UpStage festivals, the 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance culminates on 12 December with Testing 1 2, 1 2, 1 2: a 27-hour marathon of innovative shows in a variety of online platforms including UpStage, Waterwheel Tap, Second Life, Visitors Studio, mosiaka.tv and others.

This programme celebrates the diversity of cyberformance, bold experimentation at the bleeding edge of live networked performance, and the growing popularity and accessibility of live internet art. The 28 shows, by more than 100 artists from around the world, are all accessible to online audiences with just a standard internet connection and browser: attending the shows is as easy as clicking a link.

Festival architects Vicki Smith and Helen Varley Jamieson said that opening up the festival to other online platforms has greatly expanded the festival, building connections and collaborations with other online arts communities and nurturing the fields of cyberformance and networked performance. "The underlying common factor is that the internet is the site for our live performance work; we use the tools that best suit the work, and we have an increasing variety of tools to choose from."

School children from the Chatham Islands and New Zealand's West Coast have created ten UpStage performances, which they will present to the world from their remote locations. Other UpStage performances are A Plunge in the Pool by the Dutch/Italian trio who wowed audiences at last year's festival with Flat Earth; Stratosphukic Storm by the French artists' collective APO33 who have participated in previous festivals; and i am here because you are here #4 by Stefan Riebel (Germany) who will experiment with using only the text chat element of the UpStage platform.

Six shows use the Waterwheel Tap, an online collaborative platform launched in 2011. These shows explore themes including desire, shadows, water and political protest; and one, Since the end of the world, will make use of brand new 3D webcam technology - audiences are recommended to wear 3D glasses! The Tap is also the venue for DELTAP: Nodes Welcome - sessions for the hosts of 121212 nodes around the world to exchange greetings and information about their events. Nodes are physical venues that screen sections of the festival programme for local audiences; this year there are 14 nodes, from New Zealand to Buenos Aires, Europe and the USA.

The virtual world Second Life is the site for three performances: Babble, Senses Places and Moving Mountains. Second Life users can attend the shows in-world, and a stream will be broadcast to the UpStage web site for audiences outside Second Life. Other shows employing streaming technology are: Angry, a new rendition of Annie Abraham's ongoing performative research into anger; Transamericana, connecting opposite ends of the Americas; and the networked music performances Oceans Between Sound by Ethernet Orchestra, and Netcomposition6 and Netcomposition7 by Ian Whalley and Ivan Zavada. The festival concludes with Dan Untitled's Afterparty, a live streamed DJ set by long-time UpStager Dan Untitled, who is also hosting an outdoor node in central Wellington.

This is the sixth annual festival of cyberformance - live online interactive events created and presented for online audiences. The 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance is supported by a grant from Creative New Zealand as well as a dedicated team of technical assistants, volunteers and a large community of artists. CityLink provides sponsored server hosting and the Auckland University of Technology supports the ongoing development of the UpStage platform through student projects.

For more information,
visit www.upstage.org.nz or email info@upstage.org.nz

Your donation to UpStage is much appreciated and will help to make 121212 a success!

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