Update: Baba’s talk on Digital Duets from TEDxYork is now live. Watch it at the bottom of this post.
It’s interesting to look back at previous generations’ thoughts on the future. Back in the 60s a cartoon showed us what the year 2000 was going to be like, with flying cars, travelators everywhere, houses in the clouds, and video calling. The Jetsons was a little ahead of it’s time with what it was predicting, and while not all of it has come true (my favourite rant on this is this facebook group), there are quite a few that have.
One of the technologies that has come into being is video chat. Even though video conferencing technologies have been a reality since the 70s, it wasn’t until 2003 when Skype made it close to mainstream.
However, it’s what we do next with these kind of systems that excites me more.
Telepresence, which uses the basics of video chat to make it feel as if the person is present in the room, starts to open doors for more than just chatting to your grandmother in Norway while she’s hunting polar bears. There are telepresence classrooms, doctors via telepresence and even AA meetings via Skype.
Last Thursday I attended TEDxYork at York University, which looked at the ways that the arts is inspiring creativity within other areas like science and technology (and vice versa). Baba Israel, a hip hop artist and artistic director of Manchester’s Contact Theatre, has been using telepresence in a way that I’ve never seen before. He began using Skype to collaborate on improvised spoken word pieces with artists in his home town of New York. This progressed to actually performing some of these pieces on stage, with the other artists linked in via Skype, projected onto a large screen behind him.
While this is rather awesome in itself, he wanted to take this work further. Last year his company choreographed a hip hop piece via Skype to be performed by New York based dancer Future and Manchester based group Shockarellas, performing the piece in a theatre in Manchester, with the dancers connected via Skype. The result is an amazing piece of art meets technology, that proves that, in the right context, piped in performers have as much presence on stage as their physically present counterparts. (There is a video of the performance here, but I’m searching for a higher quality version) This year he’s pushing on with a full length theatre piece, with actors on different sides of the world performing via telepresence.
For decades our ideas haven’t been able to come to fruition because of the limitations with technology and cost. It seems that we are getting closer and closer to the meeting point of reality and science fiction, where the limitations are more around what we can think to do, as opposed as what we can do. It’s interesting, as it means that tomorrow’s artists won’t be the same as yesterday’s artists. Yesterday’s artists rely on representations of ideas, thoughts and dreams; painters, sculptors, poets. Tomorrow’s artists will be technicians, coders, designers and engineers. I think it’s about time that we marry the two and start seeing creatives and technicians as collaborators, as opposed to two completely seperate things.
This may be something that the web industry is already catching up with. At Future of Web Design, one of the speakers said that you can no longer call yourself a Web Designer if you don’t understand the technical processes and code that go behind it. However, it’s a brilliant prospect that this is going to start leeching into other industries to the point where innovation will become a daily thing.
That makes me extremely excited.
great article on telepresence, thanks