WHAT IS THE MAIN IDEA OF THE PROJECT AND WHO IS THE TARGET GROUP?

i-Map is a one-year interdisciplinary collaborative project implemented through a trans-European network of four participating media art organisations, dedicated to fostering new and innovative works of art through effective integration of interactive technologies and live performance practices.

I-map’s primary aims are to support research and analysis of new media technologies and provide a backbone for development and presentation of co-productions on a trans-European level. Additionally, this project aims at opening a European discourse examining the way today’s society interacts with technology, and integrates its benefits on the structure of global communication, and the way in which digital art is changing our perception of the world.

A streaming, telekinetic performance event is proposed as the closing phase of the project. Through a collaborative inter-media creative process, developed simultaneously by four teams of artists in co-organising institutions (media artists, directors and choreographers, programmers and software developers, as well as performers of various mediums), a fully developed dramaturgical structure will be created in order to thoughtfully integrate elements of interactive media and new technologies with live performance practices.

WHAT DOES THE PROJECT INCLUDE?

The collaborative performance "See you in Walhalla" was realised on 14 September 2006. The central performance took place in Athens, while two other site specific performances located in Amsterdam and Sofia were linked into the game via the internet.

Three geographically dislocated performers played simultaneously, interconnected by a 3D live game environment. According to Project Facilitator Floor van Spaendonck: "They represented different phases of confusion of the main character who gets mixed up in the virtual world: 'the avatar' of the game; 'the player', a real person who is playing the game; and 'the confused state of the player', a mix of half human and half avatar."

During the journey through the game, the player/avatar wandered across a virtual trans-geographic cityscape made up of footage from Amsterdam, Athens and Sofia. The avatar's ability to provide a shell for many people in many places at the same time enabled comparative explorations upon the social geography of urban life in Western cities. It also brought up questions about how global communication and digital art are influencing/changing our perception of the world.

The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.