I Just Found This Fascinating...
Theater of Code — with Ursula Endlicher, Adrianne Wortzel, MTAA; Curated by Christiane Paul :: March 3, 2009; 7:30 pm :: Light Industry, 220 36th Street, 5th Floor, Brooklyn, New York.
Theater of Code will present three performance / interventions that explore how computer code, scripting language, and software applications relate to the movement of bodies and the staging and choreography of our lives. Adrianne Wortzel’s A Re-enactment of The Battle of the Pyramids is a performance installation of reconfigured robotic toys performing military maneuvers in rigid choreographed formations. Clusters of these toys snap to synchronization in response to a call to arms, their movements emulating the rigid and postured fighting strategies of Napoleonic warfare. These strategies, employed in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, were particularly idiosyncratic in Egypt where they were persistently performed without consideration of either the desert environment or the fighting strategies of the enemy. The work is intended as a testimony to the tragic consequences of imperialism and the dangers, follies and sadness of a rationale for blind obedience that makes victims out of warriors. Ursula Endlicher’s Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited is a ten-part live performance series, which utilizes Web code as choreography. In the performance of facebook on March 3, 2009, at Light Industry, three dancers, the audience, and the artist will shape the course of the performance. The source of the website — its HTML tags — is interpreted live on stage into new dance movements, which are immediately translated into text-based descriptions and then stored online in the html-movement-library. This information is reused on stage as new instruction material. As the data performance progresses, more html-movements are developed, stored and altered by the participants. The user (=the audience) takes an active role in the performance of facebook.com. The inclusion of the html-movement-library on stage enables a simultaneous exchange of instruction and performance, data and movement input and output, and a continuous transfer between Web and body. MTAA returns to Light Industry with two new performances of code-based art. In the first work — titled $”##’ — MTAA re-stages John Cage’s 4′33″ within a framework of a new media lecture. The second project is a demonstration of Autotrace, a software-generated appropriation and shape creation system. As part of the Autotrace performance, MTAA will use one of the newly generated “Autotraced shapes” to create a ridiculously large, two-dimensional, site-specific work right in front of the audience’s eyes. Together, the three projects comment on the various levels in which our movements—from military maneuvers to social interaction and the presentation of a lecture—are encoded by technologies.
Emmitt Says... How is technology impacting the art of theater? I think in some ways technology has had less impact upon theater as opposed to everything else in the world. It certainly has impacted Broadway as they have technological explosions to attract the tourism side of theater. But at the gut level of theater, Community theater, off and off off Broadway theater, it is for the most part just as it has always been. It is the pureness of word, sound and form that propels theater forward and captivates the minds and souls of theater lovers. It is a close mimic of our own lives and realities. Examining us at the most basic levels.
There have and still are many trying to incorporate technology into the Art of Theater. Some with more success than others. The trick of course is how do we take theater to another level using technology but still maintaing the attributes of a theater we care about and love. The theater that emotionally appeals to something deeper inside us that seems to need this basic live interaction to justify our existence.
I don't know what the answer is, but feel that we must pursue that model where technology and theater co exist peacefully along side each other. Theater of Code may be part of the puzzle. Maybe connecting Artists Globally, as is the ambition of Artist Magnet, to do it on a Global basis in a central location can be the bridge leading us into finding those answers with our fellow International Artist.

History will answer that...

Emmitt thrower
et@wabisabiproductions.com