Project title:
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Project concept and description:
"Between Before and After" is a real-life real-time performance that addresses
revolutionary changes in subjectivity and love resulting from new modes
of communication created by Internet technology. This performance will
articulate a fundamentally new paradigm in interpersonal relationships
and will show evidence of a radically new mode of human exchange. The performance
will reveal ways that the Internet has been instrumental in constructing,
developing and sustaining desire, longing and love. It will also demonstrate
ways that new forms of desire and communication are significantly different
from older, outmoded and traditional means of falling in love.
If love and sex are always already virtual and only exist as Freudian projection
onto an other as Slavoj Zizek has argued,
how does this projection and virtuality manifest itself differently in
new communication technologies? How does desire unfold in a mode of exchange
that lacks physical presence, and that takes the form of homogeneous digital
text and telepresent remote communication? Where can the subjectivity be
located in digital text? How does one love and sustain love through or
despite mediation by a computer screen and digital networks? Although communication
is always mediated and never transparent, how is the meditation different
across networks? Is computer-mediated love as "true" as previous forms
of love?
The performance merges art and life in the tradition of Fluxus and early
Conceptual Performance art. Yet the medium of the Internet allows for an
even more seamless merge, whether or not communication began as art or
as life (in this case the exchange began with art), in the end it is difficult
to mark the boundaries between the two. Shulgin and Bookchin met each other
in cyberspace and fell in love with a first e-mail. Both are on the forefront
of the digital revolution: she, a progressive American professor of digital
media and artist and he, an Eastern European underground net artist. They
live on the opposite sides of the world separated by oceans, time zones
and custom patrols. They never met in physical space yet developed a deep
loving relationship. Not just the fact of the initial meeting, but also
the means in which the meetings continue to take place and the ongoing
relationship between the two, reveal a new and revolutionary form of human
exchange. The project will take form in a public presentation at ISEA98
and in a web site devoted to the project, which will include diaristic
impressions, select correspondence and audio-visual documentation of the
performance. The performance will include past and real time documentation
and will include evidence and commentary on key moments in the relationship,
such as the first meetings in cyberspace, the first meeting in physical
space (which will take place at ISEA98),
dinner in a restaurant, the morning after, last minutes before saying good-bye
and returning to remote locations.
Technical requirements:
- computer with Video-in
- Internet access
- scanner
- cameraperson with a camera to shoot the most significant moments of the project
Budget:
- 2 return tickets (Los Angeles - Liverpool, Moscow - Liverpool)
- 2 room apartment in a Liverpool hotel for one week.
