Performing Arts Laboratory |
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Performing Arts Laboratory |
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This short document suggests the concept of a Performing Art’s Laboratory, arising from collaboration between the Interaction Design Centre and the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick. As cultural content becomes a major facet of the new media explosion and with technology increasingly finding a central place in cultural production, a laboratory dedicated to exploration of the many issues arising from this combination would be both timely and interesting.
Technologically mediated cultural production raises a host of issues of direct concern to both the above departments. These include HCI, CSCW and interactive hypermedia, which is of course where media art and computer science meet. From the artistic perspective, issues include the exploration of new media tools to facilitate both the performance and teaching of the various artistic disciplines undertaken at the IWMC.
The focus is strongly biased towards the collaboration and communication aspects of interactive media, as media is but a manifestation of the transmission of culture, that which binds a community together through shared values, relations, dreams and aspirations. A hypermedia web makes this putative community potentially global.
This development offers the possibility of new interfaces between artist and audience allowing participation by everyone in ways previously impossible.
These developments indicate the holistic, multi-disciplinary perspective so evident in the new media, something that PAL could foster and encourage. An environment where artists and engineers could develop a common language of shared experience would greatly expand the possibilities of both academic and applied research.
In particular, PAL offers Arts Outreach a way to really interact with both the existing arts community, both local and global and perhaps more excitingly, the creation of new communities empowered to participate through an erosion of the elitism so depressingly common in academic arts institutions. Much of the innovative work in new media has come from the street culture so often dismissed within academic circles. The holistic perspective demands an open minded approach to all types of cultural production.
