REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE IN VIRTUAL WORLDS:Studying Socio-Technical Environments through Multi-site Machinic Performance

This Fellowship examines music performance in networked environments, where the performance can be an improvisation, the playing of a notated score with other performers in a different physical location, and can even be a music performance staged within a virtual world, such as found in a gaming environment.The area of real-time networked music performance is a growing practice. Unfortunately it is under-explored by professional musicians, although computer network based practice has a drastic impact on the nature of music performance. It is therefore essential that in the shaping of future technologies and cultures the valuable practical considerations and critical reflections of a human performer be taken into account. Such practice-based approach stands in contrast to the conception of new systems according to the availability or ability of a certain technology.Networked performance environments raise practical and cultural issues that need to be addressed in order to better understand our engagement with technologies, their development, as well as their social and cultural impact.Some of those issues are the performer's and audience's experience of the performance, the type of language that may have to develop between performer and audience, the redefinition of performance in a virtual environment, as well as the cultural and technological implications of those environments.Music performance is a highly suited field for examining the social and cultural engagements in networked spaces, as it is the field where physical, time-based, subjective and inter-personal concerns are most apparent. By means of critical reflection on inherent meanings and on the social and cultural changes that network technology creates, the Fellowship will contribute to the advancement of our insights and understanding of socio-technical systems. The Fellow's practical performance skills and bodily knowledge, derived from her daily human-to-human interaction, provide excellent tools for addressing those questions.The proposed research will stage seven networked performances with local and international performers that will be recorded, edited and annotated.Ethnographically informed studies will be conducted in the form of interviews with performers and audiences in order to determine people's performance experience and their social engagement.The research will provide critical insight into social interaction and behaviour in virtual worlds and help us to better understand how music performance becomes altered in virtual spaces. Through regular public concerts, seminars and workshops, creative practice in musical networked performances will be disseminated. Insights into the nature of networked performance systems will thus be presented to performers, composers, theorists, the computer music community, and the listening public.The proposed Fellow is a professional performer of saxophone and a live improviser of international standing with a wide range of performing experiences that vary from orchestral playing to free jazz improvisation. The Fellow also has a strong background in theoretical writing and has published widely in conference proceedings and international journals. She is therefore highly suited to examine and question the impact that networked technology has on the area of music performance.