Virtual Humanoids
LIVE PERFORMANCE WITH REAL-TIME 3D IN THE PLANETARIUM DOME
Virtual Humanoids was a hybrid stage-and-screen performance by The Men Who Knew Too Much, staged in the dome of the Melbourne Planetarium at Scienceworks in July 2000. The dome itself was the projection surface, enveloping an audience reclined beneath it, while live performers worked the seam between stage and screen, the live and the virtual.
Adam Nash composed the music, programmed the real-time 3D, and performed as Setarcos – a hacker who drove the images and real-time virtual reality (VRML) live from the stage, emailing longingly to the only visible woman, Yayoi Yasuma (Mami Yamanaka), who emails back that she is virtual.
Virtual Humanoids is notable for being one of the - if not the - first ever live performances to incorporate virtual reality (VR) technology. It was the year 2000, so we used VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), a markup language for turning the web into a navigable 3D space. The web itself was relatively new at that stage, and we used html to actually drive the entire show. This was radical and exciting at the time.
From a review in RealTime magazine #38 (Aug-Sep 2000) by Peta Tait
In this space Virtual Humanoids was a wondrous meeting of interfaces; electronic art and absurdism, screen and stage, live and virtual, human bodies and computerised voices. The venue's white dome-shaped roof functioned as more than the computer screen: it enveloped audience bodies leaning back in their chairs angled towards the horizontal. Projected images floated across laid-out torsos and upturned faces.
Virtual Humanoids' polished, stylised format integrated its digital imagery completely with live sequences. Electronic technology was used in the artmaking, not merely as the broadcast medium. I found myself silently disputing Philip Auslander's claim that the televisual invariably dominates liveness. My attention roamed equally between the performers' faces and screen images…
Screen images alternated back streets and identikit houses, with abstract computer generated figures and patterns, several of which were sensationally beautiful mobiles and sensory tunnels.
If the show's gentle humour highlighted the deliciousness of human opportunism and games in the dotcom world, its form linked the disembodiment of dotcoms to dehumanising corporate norms… making connections between the web's illogicality and its market driven commercialism is a crucial message towards awareness of the consequence of social life mediated by on-line languages.
Virtual Humanoids … offers an innovative approach with its comic expressiveness and captivating spaces that expose the failings, foibles and duplicity of these new technologies we love.
CREDITS:
The Men Who Knew Too Much. Simon Hill (writer-designer), Patrick Cronin, Louis Dingemans, Richard Gray and Adam Nash, with Peter Eckersall and Mami Yamanaka on screen. Performance director: Susie Dee. Music and real-time 3D: Adam Nash.
EXHIBITED:
- Melbourne Planetarium, Scienceworks, Melbourne, Australia. July 2000.
- Gamma Space Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. 2001.
- Digital Summer, Culture Shock Festival, Manchester, UK. 2002.
- Arnolfini, Bristol, UK. 2002.
Review: Peta Tait, RealTime #38, Aug–Sept 2000, pp. 15, 17–18.