Online Performance Art

A new online space. BMW Tate Live: Performance Room

We’re pleased to announce a major new partnership and the first artistic programme created purely for live web broadcast.

BMW Tate Live will be a four-year programme focused on performance and interdisciplinary art. We will launch the programme with BMW Tate Live: Performance Room, a series of artist performances created specifically to be broadcast live online.

Each performance will take place in a dedicated gallery-cum-studio space at Tate Modern, but they will be conceived specifically for the online audience (and there will be no audience physically present in the space). The performances will be filmed and streamed live online, with discussion channels open either during or after the performances, depending on the works. We’re most excited to be moving away from thinking of online streaming as a secondary way of accessing the live programme and to think about it as a primary space in which artists can present work and perform. This format will provide global, online audiences the opportunity to experience new works first-hand in the format they were devised for and also create a space for people to discuss those works directly.

There will be five commissions for BMW Tate Live: Performance Room in 2012, and the first will be by the French choreographer, Jérôme Bel in March. Bel’s work explores the relationship between performer and spectators, and the role of dance within culture, often using humour to break the formality of a traditional theatre setting.

hmmmm.

An artist living in a gallery for the duration of a show is a trope of visual art performance, which left a mark in popular culture portrayals of performance art. Even though these works emphasize considerations of the gallery space, the relationship between the artist and the audience is not always the center of the piece. In the iconic I Love America and America Loves Me, Joseph Beuys was rushed from the airport to a New York gallery in an ambulance and left in an ambulance, leaving the US without having set foot on its soil or conversed with any of the country's residents. Tracy Emin lived in a locked room in a Stockholm gallery as part of Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made in 1996. The audience could only see her naked figure through fish-eye lenses embedded in the walls as she spent her days painting.

In a new project launching November 2, Berlin-based artist Gretta Louw takes this relationship two steps forward, one step back. Like Beuys, she could not be seen at the gallery, but like Emin, she will be viewed through a lens. Twenty-four hours a day for the ten day duration of the show, Louw will be in constant communication with her audience via different online platforms: Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. The project, Controlling_Connectivity, is described on Art Laboratory Berlin's site,

Controlling_Connectivity uses the pervasiveness of internet-based social networking, as well as the obligation and opportunity for constant connection with these platforms as a paradigm for a severe and systematic disruption of normal, socially accepted patterns of life and interpersonal interaction during a self-documented performance. Taking to its natural extreme the notion that new technologies are increasingly dictating our social interaction, professional life, and have a far reaching effect on many other aspects of daily life, Gretta Louw will complete a durational performance, living in the gallery space in complete isolation except for contact through various social networking sites and the internet.

Reading and hearing about this project, I was surprised that in the decade since JenniCam or weliveinpublic.com (both late 90s lifecasting experiments, but whereas Jennifer Ringley's JenniCam became a cultural phenomenon, Josh Harris's weliveinpublic.com was framed as a conceptual art project and ended citing mental, personal, and financial losses) the culture of constant connectivity was not more critically commented on in the art around me. I can think of numerous examples of direct streaming of performances, liveblogging, constant twitting, etc., but not of many examples of a critical practice that examines these platforms in and of themselves. This is what Louw is hoping to do.

And Louw seems to be in good company these days. Tate Modern is launching BMW Tate Live: Performance Room, a series of artist performances created specifically to be broadcast live online. Catherine Wood, curator of contemporary art/performance at Tate Modern, writes that this initiative marks a shift from thinking of online streaming as "a secondary way of accessing the live program and to think about it as a primary space in which the artists can present work and perform." Again, the actual performance room at Tate will be closed to the public, who will be experiencing the performance directly online. The relationship between performance art and online presence offers so much, that it is about time for it to be further complicated, questioned, and surveyed.

I am going to ask to talk to her online on skype about her work, it's relevant to what i'm doing. I found her article on rhizome.org really good web page and she is related to Art Laboratory Berlin! The Tate website is really good too. Lots of Interesting topics!