Performance / June 13th-20th at Station VasteMonde (Saint-Brieuc artistic residency)
Project with Thierry Marceau, Québec.
Programming : Stéphane Bachelier
2 webcams Streams / VLC + Pure-Data / Chroma key / Streaming live on Http:
AA4 - extrait 1 from donald abad on Vimeo.
AA4 - extrait 2 from donald abad on Vimeo.
This project is about a virtual journey of two real adventurers :
Donald Abad and Thierry Marceau. The first in France and the second in Québec lived in a basement , alone, during 7 days&nights. However this is not a limit . Together they hit the road and accomplished their travel through their Internet connexion.
In their underground studio, the two separate adventurers were placed on a video blue-screen (chroma key), and were recorded constantly by a webcam. These two video flux were associated - on realtime - only on an Internet webpage, in a streaming video. The «fake» background and the «hors-champ» were only visible by the visitors of the exhibition, through a videosurveillance screen. (see schema above).
The websurfer was able to watch a video showing the two «adventurers», wearing explorer’s clothes, nomad equipment, trekking tent and food. The vocabulary, the movements, the conversation were the ones of journeymen.
The idea of this performance is to question the concept of the «still voyager» («le voyageur immobile» by G. Deleuze) with some settings similar to the prison jail ones (underground, no natural but only artificial light,…). How to feel free, how to dream about horizons, how to get hope to go further? And where to go?
Because the two explorers couldn’t talk or be connected to someone else, they will live «together» night&day. We tried to identify and symbolize what is an electronic (not only «virtual») relationship, what is a social network. The journey was a metaphor of these virtual agora, countries, and universe.
Through these extreme settings, and with some powerful situations, truth, hopes, friendship, dreams or the abandonment, renunciation, paranoia, all was revealed in their real scale. It was a hard fight for and against Realism.
View of the surveillance tv-screen
View of the exhibition Surveillance TV-screen