Researching Performance - Performing Research.

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Researching performance,
performing research:
dance, multimedia and learning
Synne Skjulstad, Andrew Morrison & Albertine Aaberge,
InterMe
InterMedia, University of Oslo
Figure 1: Willson Phiri & Stephanie Sund in a digitally enhanced

duet; video still from performance at Statens balletthgskole,
Oslo, December 2001.
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Researching ICTs in Context
A sense of context
One day at a time
It's the middle of the week, early in the afternoon and we are about midway
through a collaborative educational and research project called Ballectro.1
As the name suggests, the project is a hybrid of dance and digital media.
The slate grey autumn sky bounces up from the Oslo fjord into the large
curved windows of one of the studios at Statens balletthgskole.2 Six final
year modern dance students are in a class with their choreography teacher
and are joined by three project participants from InterMedia at the University of Oslo. We are workshopping material which may become a part of a
dance and multimedia performance scheduled for the end of the semester
at both our institutions. We are also collaborative learners in a project investigating dance and multimedia. Yet, as multimedia researchers we are
also learning how to carry out research into digital media as performance.
Improvisation is central to today's session as is often the case in our
ongoing collaboration both as performance and as research. The choreographer has asked the students to select one figure each from a large
cluster of postcards and to use it as a springboard to developing a solo
piece. The pieces will then be combined in a larger sequence which,
later, might be included in the overall performance. The students improvise their solos and then, after a break, they repeat and refine them,
this time accompanied by music. This music had been developed especially for the project by a different student who has volunteered his talents to the project. The students develop their movements, some of
them very actively, others through more intimate expressions. In the
corner, the digital music maker lies fast asleep, stretched out between
his studies, a part-time job and composing the music for the project.
The choreographer darts between the students, quietly moving them into
slightly different positions, whispering suggestions to two of them. She
places each card on the floor at the front of the studio, mimicking the spatial
zones in which each of the students is moving. The electronic music, still in
an early version, creates the sense of future performance, one to be remixed,
and reperformed as our collage-like approach becomes more coherent.
'Come over here and take part,' the choreographer says to the two
multimedia developers sitting in the corner. 'Just dance,' she encourages
with a smile. And slowly we begin to fumble around between the styled
improvisation of the students. They seem quite unperturbed by our
Researching performance, performing research
wobbly steps. Later, as the media players in this unfolding scene, we

comment to one another that this is what ethnographers do, they become
part of the fabric of the context they a researching, if not its soloists!
Background to Ballectro
Collaborative project design
In this chapter we present material from this collaborative educational

project involving improvisation, dance and multimedia. This varied for the
different partners in the collaboration. In this sense the chapter is about
'learning performance'. We therefore also explicitly used the project as a
research agenda generating process. Recent research into the potential intersections of dance and digital media has often carried out through collaborative processes and workshops. For example, Birringer (1996) details
the heuristics of one such workshop as being ' offered to provide a laboratory for the organic intergration of performance and digital arts, and for
the development of new interdisciplinary methods of composition.' As media researchers and teachers in the field of digital media, we discuss ways
of conducting and understanding research as and through performance.
We suggest, by close reference to the development and performance of a
multimedia-enhanced dance piece, that researching ICTs might be expanded to include notions of performance.
We suggest that this is potentially fruitful at several levels. First, that research into ICTs sees context as a significant element in how research is
performed. Here, we refer specifically to how to learn to build a new media-enriched performance environment in which the medium of expression
is primarily moving bodies and moving media. Second, we suggest that research into ICTs might benefit from considering aspects of performance
studies in studying and interpreting digital media and their various representations and uses. Third, through the inclusion of visual material, from
both the process of making the dance piece and from its performance, we
offer a glimpse of how research into ICTs may to take up some of the
challenges of applying of digital media in presenting research.
A learning design
Ballectro was based on the collaborative development of a student performance for a non-fee-paying audience. This context gave us freedom
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to workshop our way into making an actual performance as well as to

be open to ways of researching an interdisciplinary interplay between
media and dance, between learning and performance, and between research processes and products. This project design allowed the students to
participate at different levels of the project as learners of dance, learners of
choreography and, to a limited extent, as learners of new media.3
We were also learners of project-based research involving new partners. As researchers and designers of digital media, our main objective
in the following collaboration process was to develop closer understanding of digital media and how dance could inform both production
and the research into ICTs.
Ballectro was an experimental new media arts project, and by definition
it involved a range of boundary crossings. In a discussion of such emergent
and experimental work, Stocker and Schpf (1999: 14) comment that:
Even though the only aspect that the heterogenous, hybrid configurations
of current works often have in common is their use of the computer that
is, their technological or material medium an essential, defining feature
of this new art is impossible to overlook: despite the experience that has
been gained and the virtousity that has developed, media art is, above all,
an experiment one that often brings the creators and the proponents of
this new art into association with engineers and researchers.
Many interdisciplinary researchers find themselves crossing fields,

methods and theories. They need to also find ways to work within these
intersections and find ways to communicate them as research.
A publication design
Dance may be an important player in the building of the interdisicplinary links between practice and theory which are needed in the study of
ICTs in culture and context. For example, in referring to a dance and
digital media workshop, Birringer (1996) comments that:
Performance dancing with and across patterns is an avenue to contest rigid or vapid formulations handed down to us since the emergence of
the strength of bodily intelligence unravels the grids and pixellated
monotonies of the computer's inscriptive power.
We take up this challenge by investigating this claim also with reference to the building of a Ballectro project research website in which a
range of media, including video, are used. In contrast, this print and
written text is one formalised means of reporting on a multimedia performance project and its processes of production and public mediation.
However, as we argue, the web site provides a more fully mediated
possibility for understanding the project. This context refers to the mediation of the content of Ballectro, that is as dance, as multimedia and
as research. Yet, it also refers to a way of communicating research centred on a process-based exploratory design.
As developers, teachers and researchers of new media ourselves, we
have found it difficult to locate an elaborated learning and research
context within which to place a project such as the one we present here.
Huge financial and technical resources have been invested in ICTs, but
perhaps a time is now arriving when we ought to be more seriously
considering how the environments, content and contexts in which our
digitally mediated communication occurs do indeed intersect.
A multi-method approach
The Ballectro project employed a multi-method design in both development
and research. In the project we deliberately played with digital tools and
technologies in effect danced with them ourselves. The final performance piece was a collage of elements from a variety of learning tasks, improvisation sessions and more formal plans. Heuristically, the project generated problems which, in turn, needed immediate and longer term research
frames, solutions and explanations. Here the spiral model of software development (e.g. Denning & Dargan 1996) and a reiterative and reflexive
approach as deployed in the many sub-fields of design studies was important. In addition, production based research was realised through a process
of making. These various aspects were extended from researching the process and performance to communicating the project in digital arenas.
As with many classroom based research projects, Ballectro was carried out within a broad, but non-deterministic, action research framework. As a choreographer and media researchers, we were instrumental
in introducing new elements within the dance curriculum and at a new
media and learning research centre. We were actively involved in the
production and the research process and had an integrative role here.
Further, the research was cyclical: it involved an ongoing interplay of
theory and practice (Avison 1997: 198).
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The experimental and process character of the Ballectro project as a

learning and performance activity, also extends to finding ways to perform research on and in digital communication.
We therefore discuss questions about the changing rhetorical and
mediational contexts of presenting, reporting and analysing research.
This points to the importance of understanding multimedia project design, the application of multi-method inquiry in research processes and
designs, as well as in the analysis and presentation of research. In terms
of performing research, together these elements may be said to consitute a mutable research design. This is design is flexible, relational, selective, contingent, reflexive and hybrid.
Later in the chapter we will discuss such associations and their value
in a collaborative design and performance. In the next section we outline some of the difficulties in researching a multimedia-dance process
and its performance as text.
Researching performance
On performance
While the performing arts have existed for centuries in theatre, dance, and
song, it was in the 1970s that performance as a feature of the avant garde
become accepted as a medium of artistic expression in its own right (Goldberg 2001: 7). However, the term performance has itself been hotly contested in the complex of post-structualist approaches to media and the arts.
Performance is a cultural practice, a pratice of representation, and so inevitably enters the arena of ideology as it often did in the 1970s in the form
of happenings and agitprop pieces (Counsell and Wolf 2001: 31). A performance act may question existing systems of thought, actions, and beliefs. It may be characterised as a one-time happening realised through one
or several performers. Or, increasingly, it has come to be seen as a more
mutable event-oriented expressive discourse. A performance is the text
constructed by actors, dancers or narrators, yet its uptake lies with the
audience or the computer user. Howell (1999: 146) argues that:
As performers you are looking for an 'action language': one you can
spontaneously 'speak'So you need to think by performing, instead of
trying to complete your thinking prior to the performance. Performing
is not a translation from another language. As in writing, where the hand

thinks the sentences, your actions must think the performance.
In recent years many researchers and educators have made claims about
the need to develop multimodal, multiliteracies (e.g. Kress 1998, Kress
1999, Tyner 1998). Yet, in their often wide-ranging discussions of digital
literacies, few such writers refer directly to dance and the role of performing arts more generally, preferring to remain with broad issues of access,
competence and intertextuality. Further, in the now large literature on 'new'
media, 'digital dance' has not featured prominently, in comparison, for example, with hypernarrative or computer games. Researchers of games and
'interactivity' (e.g. Aarseth 2002) and writers on the usability of websites
(Nielsen & Tahir 2001) are also investigating questions of performance in
what Brenda Laurel (1993) has called 'Computers as Theatre'. While concerns such as the user's discourse (Liestl 2002 forthcoming) in games and
the functionality of websites do indeed merit research, the performing arts
in digital environments are often overshadowed by more commercially intended products. Further, electronic arts in general have not featured
strongly in the research discourses on learning, ICTs and context.
In contrast, electronic performing arts are often conceptual and of an
embodied nature; they occur both a physical performance texts by
dancers, yet they are also constructed by audiences. These performance
pieces may occur only online, but they frequently exist in real time, and
in material spaces, such as installation pieces in art galleries or as
mixed media performance works in front of an assembled audience.4
Dance may also be implicit in these works (e.g. Schiphorst 1996/1997,
1997). Such mixed media performance art is often difficult to categorise. Typically such experimental works play on notions of hybridity,
identity, human-machine relations and the subjectivity of the viewer or
interactant (Jones & Stephenson 1999). These works tend to be reflexive in character. They draw our attention to the ways in which digital
media may be used to mediate performance, whether art, dance or
drama. In contrast to computer games, which by definition must be
played on screen, or online, many performance pieces which use digital
media do so by shifting between different types of screens, projections
and media types; together these are part of an emerging live event in which
plot, movement, music, and scenography may all be in flux. The intention
of the artist is thus often that of mediating this flux to an audience.
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The use of digital media in performance now also implies that its
elements and structures may also be not only machine mediated but
also machine generated. Thus, since the mid-1990s, the contexts of performance have increasingly included elements of digital media in which
animation, projection and random selection have entered into the performative text. They have challenged our notions of performance at
both the textual and the interpretive level, and further in the intersection, cross-over and hybridisation of these levels. In the print collection
Performing the Body/Performing the Text, edited by Jones and Stephenson
(1999), a performance script by Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante is interleafed with more traditional expository academic discourse on performance and interpretation. When multimedia material is included in both performance pieces and in research about them relationships between text and
interpretation, 'actors' and audiences may become more complex.
Changing research literacies

Research into the performing arts has a long history, one in which critical interpretation has been paramount. The processes of dramatic production or musical composition, for example, have gradually become
more central to our teaching and researching the performing arts. This
can be seen in a leading British project into the role of practice in research. Hosted at the University of Bristol (Department of Drama:
Theatre, Film, Television) 'Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP)'
is a five year project which is investigating the intersections between creativity, performance and the broading of research paradigms to include new
modes of performance. Such information is to be found online. It points to
the emergence of attempts to meet the challenges suggested by both experiments with digital media and performance, and in attempts to convey
this interplay between theory and practice via digital media.5
For developers, teachers and researchers of digital media who work with
performance arts, an initiative such as this one suggests that there is growing professional concern to establish ways of better understanding relationshsips between ICTs as compositional and mediational tools and the
contexts in which they are made, used and interpreted. However, in parts of
the academy there is both a lack of interest in these relationships as well as a
resistance to understand and to investigate them as arenas for serious research. While there may be research on practitoner-researchers (e.g. Jarvis
1999) referring to relationships between work-based learning, adult education and practice-based research in knowledge-making, many universities
are in the process of learning how to apply digital media in online teaching
programmes. Less prominent is a concern with mediating research based on
knowledge, experience and insights from new media production and the
evolving compositional processes of multimedia research discourse.
This points back to the ealier reference to digital or electronic literacies.
In the context of such relationships between production and analysis of
digital media texts and contexts, these electronic literacies are defined not
so much by their realisation via a generation of students who have grown
up with digital media, but as part of a potentially modulated research and
pedagogical expertise to which the academy ought to already be investing.
Many university websites still make limited use of a variety digital
media and related research and pedagogical designs which truly stretch
new media communicatively, that is in relation to both content and
tools. Further, few of the university websites which are concerned with
dance could be said to be media-rich. In this respect, a recent symposium hosted by PARIP (which we did not attend) was held to realise its
general aim of investigating 'creative-academic issues raised by practice
as research, where performance is understood as theatre, dance, film,
video and television.' To this we would add digital and online media. The
symposium covered four main themes which we paraphrase here as they
are similar to issues we address in relation to Ballectro. The PARIP symposium discussed: what practice is as research; how practice may be questioned as research in 'live' and 'recording' media; ways of documenting and
re-presenting practice as research; and, the ways in which academic contexts of practice as research affect how it is pursued and evaluated.6
On the research front, many of the online publications about digital
media and dance tend to have been written from a dance, rather than a
media, perspective (e.g. Wechsler, no date). While this chapter approaches the collaborative Ballectro project from the point of vew of
digital media, we believe that it is important that performance and
dance be more fullly included in the fast growing field of digital media
studies. We argue this because performance arts and performance sudies
can contribute to the methodologies for making and analysing digital media. Thet may also play a part in hwo we increasingly come to be users of
and actant upon digital media texts, environments and communication.
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Performance-based research
Drawing on our theoretical and practical knowledge of digital media, design, learning and research, we suggest that we conceptualise performing
arts and research about them in digitally mediated domains as performance-based research. In such a research approach, digital media may be
part of the design and shaping of the of dramaturgy and scenography. In
this chapter, we attempt to support this claim by referring to Ballectro as a
pilot in which we were able to experiment with the intersection between
practice, production and performance, and ways of documenting, mediating, presenting and analysing them in and through digital media. Many
projects on ICTs appear to steer away from discussing the changing roles
of production and practice in both learning and in research. Both dance and
digital media offer possible ways to understanding how to research and to
communicate about performance in ICTs, culture and communication.
In this book, we do this via print technology and a set of established
discursive conventions. However, as the appearance of images and
weblinks suggests, this chapter refers to another, digitally mediated, communication platform, namely the Web. In our presentation of this chapter
at the accompanying SKIKT conference,7 we further draw on oral performance as well as the Web to suggest ways in which communicating research might be conducted in addition to written expository discourse. For
us this is not merely a rhetorical game: it is part of performing and practicing a wider communicative context for ICT-related research. In general
terms, this is a constitutive research discourse in which digital media is
both object and subject, synthetic and analytic, medium and message.
Finding our feet
A collaborative, interdisciplinary improvisation
In summer 2001, a cooperation between the SKIKT funded KTK project called Assemblages, based at InterMedia at the University of Oslo
and the Departement of Ballet and Dance (Statens balletthgskole) at
the Oslo National College of the Arts was initiated.8 From the start, a
process-oriented and improvisational approach characterised the collaboration. What emerged was an experimental multi-purpose project
which aimed to link dance, digital media, education and research.9
One of the objectives was to integrate digital media and dance, creating a hybrid performance. This piece would be shown in front of
audiences at our two institutions before the Christmas holiday. We also
wanted to use ICTs in experimental teaching and learning as an inquiry
into how ICTs could be used to generate institutional change, and to research how ICTs could be informed by dance and choreography. This
chapter is therefore one of a series of publications generated from this project (see e.g. Morrison et al. 2001, the Ballectro project website 2002).
Choreography meets digital media design

Cartography. Mapping. Dancers working with computers know that mapping
is not the old explorers' dream of discovering a terra incognito. We do not confront a new territory, but dance through a transformation of exisitng material
realities and relations. Once intitial squeamishness is overcome, dancers make
the best cyborgs. Haven't we been shaping and distorting our bodies and abilities with a variety of techniques for centuries. Dancers know that the borders
of the body are mutable, porous. When dancers engage with systems like motion capture they crave close contact with the abstracted digital data, not to annul it, but to share in contrasting spaces and physicalities. (Susan Kozel 1997).
This quotation points to the importance of the choroegrapher, Jane Hveding,

with whom we worked on Ballectro. She works as a dancer, a freelance
choreographer and dance teacher. She provided us with an experimental,
'free-form' approach to building a collage-like choreographic process. In
addition, she invited us into this process and provided us with the security in
which to improvise as multimedia makers, teachers and researchers.
This offered us a context within which to investigate the reciprocal
relationships between performance, movement, space and expression in
digital media and dance. Importantly, this learning context was one in
which we were not overshadowed by a dance professional who insisted
that her views dominate. Nor did she see the project in terms of more
established approaches to film/video and dance. This provided us with
an important 'space' in which to start 'finding our feet' together.
Dancing on the academic table

Jane Hveding had been selected by Statens balletthgskole to assist six
final year dance students in a course on choreography in the fall of
2001 leading up to the annual student performance. We used parts of
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the summer 2001 to meet with Jane and to discuss how such a collaborative project might be shaped and carried out. As none of us had yet
met the students, we used this time with her to experiment with the
facilities in InterMedia's new building.
Figure 2: Jane Hveding in the video conference room at

InterMedia, summer2001 on the first day of our collaboration;
(left) infinite regression in projected image; (right) the same
event filmed from a different camera and projected onto one of
the other screens.
We began this by workshopping in the video conference room, perhaps
not the first space to think of in terms of a dance and digital media project. By introducing a choreographer to this facility, we suddenly found
ourselves in the middle of a 'stunt' performance, where the videoconferencing system was transformed into a surveillance camera arena
for projecting the moving images of the choreographer who had begun
to dance on the room's tables. Right at the start, we could see, and we
could sense, that physical movement and improvisation would be central to the project. Not only would it be a way of trying out different
choreographic configurations, it would also be a way of thinking about
how the 'apparatus' of digital media might itself be moved, shifted off
the desktop and used reflexively to suggest ways of looking at movement and the visual, as dance, as digital media and as digital-dance.
The workshopping moved on to InterMedia's tv-studio buried in the
basement of our new building. This was a studio still very much needing to be used and promoted and, therefore, later we were able to comandeer it for weeks at a time. Initially, on our part as multimedia designers
and researchers, we saw this not as a tv-studio, but as an experimental

multimedia space. However, this was not how the studio had been designed, nor was it how the technician responsible for it viewed how the
space ought be used or managed. Over time, her interests in the project
grew and she made an invaluable contribution to its technical success.
However, at first she was alarmed that we wanted to unscrew video projectors, remove lights and replace enormous, professional tv cameras with
an improvisation process including hand-held digital video cameras.
In this project we would repeatedly need to explain that we were not interested, as it were, in pre-defined settings, either spatially, technically, choreographically or educationally. We would need to explain that we were
learning how to collaborate in an interdisciplinary performance-based project. We would again and again also need to explain that the nature of this
developmental production and performance research inquiry would need to
be understood in terms somewhat different to many of the reports on ICT
and learning projects in which research designs are already largely given.
Through a glass darkly

In one of the first shared sessions in the studio, which included the choreographer, technician, and multimedia makers, we experimented with
equipment which was already available. Here we were interested in
seeing the space as other than a zone for broadcasting.
A computer projector, a mobile fabric screen and different lights
were combined in ways that pre-figured the collage-like structure of
much of the project. What was also important at this early stage, as
Stone (1995) suggests with digital media, was that we improvised and
played. In this studio we rarely sat down, other than on the floor. In this
session we found an ordinary drinking glass which somebody had left
in the room, and as a result, the blue light from the projector (not yet
connected to a laptop) was beamed through the end of this glass. In this
play, we took turns in moving between the projector and screen, and
behind the screen, some of the effects of which can be seen in Figure 3
below. We saw for oursleves that we would need to think through the
work with the students, and for the final performance, in new ways for
dance and for digital media. We would need to rethink more established
conventions of video and film on and for dance, just as for digital media we would need to move beyond the confines of the desktop.
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Figure 3: 'Through a glass darkly '. Andrew Morrison and Jane

Hveding during the first session in the tv-studio at InterMedia,
summer 2001. The inverted camera was used together with video
feedback in the later performances.
These examples are mentioned because they illustrate a bottom-up way
of working which was essential for the project. The playful mood in
which this collaboration started was continued during the further work
with the students and with making the performance piece itself.
Reconfiguring learning contexts

Collaborative learning
To work on such a project of simultaneous teaching and learning, we

needed to learn about dance and choreography. We also needed to learn
how to incorporate the media in a performance context. In broad terms,
we had to learn by doing and this doing was to be done via workshop
dance and digital media sessions in which improvisation, play, experimentation and rehearsal were central.
In this respect, the project drew on the notions and actions approach
of the reflective practitioner (Schn 1983, 1987) and tried not only to
apply them to dance education (McFee 1994), but to the composition of
a multimedia-dance project: as learning, as design and as research.
Where such an approach may be opposed to a technical rationalism, it
sees knowledge as inherent practice and practice as a means of finding
solutions to problems, as well as theorising them. Thus reflective practice is a route to generating knowledge, but one in which this is seen as
socially constructed. In the case of the Ballectro project, this was an in-
determinate, processural reflection-in-action, and one that needed to

look outwards from known disciplinary borders in the collaborative
shaping of a new hybrid performance and space. As Wei and Kuzmanovic
(2001) comment on the context of their collaborative dance and media
work, 'It is the rich confusion of our physical world, together with the instability of the virtual one, that allows hybrid public spaces to emerge.'
Meeting the dance students

At the start of the fall term in 2001, we met with the six students at the
Statens balletthgskole. The dance peice would need to be ready by late
November. The students were already accomplished dancers after two
years of full-time study at their institution. They were six very different
people, if of roughly the same age. The group included three women
and three men. Two of the men, Koshiwayi Sabuneti and Wilson Phiri,
come from Zimbabwe. Two of the women are also from outside Norway, Beta Kretovivov is from Iceland, Malin Rengstedt is from Sweden, while the third male dancer, Erlend Samnen is from Norway as is
the third women, Stephanie Sund. English and Norwegian were therefore the working languages of this diverse group.
These students had expressly asked for inputs on video and dance and
were interested to learn more about how digital media might be used in
dance, though they had themselves not moved much beyond web browsing
and SMS messaging. We introduced the students to the project members
and to a new institutional and practice/performance setting at the University of Oslo. In addition, we developed a tight schedule for collaboration
with them and their choreography teacher. We soon learned that, given
their other dance commitments, there would be little time for training in
digital media. All-the-same, the students were to play an active part in
making the performances, and many of the ideas and movements in the
workshops and the final performance also came from the students.
The negotiation between the various actors in the project six dance
students, a choreographer, two technical personnel, a musician, and three
media designers/researchers was complex. We were involved in a 'developing project' in which delicate negotiations were repeatedly needed
between persons, cultures and disciplines. The altering of traditional roles
such as choreographer, editor, producer and designers and dancers led to
interesting discussions among ourselves when we had to decide the credits
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in the programme for the Christmas performances. The dancers had made
their own solos, the project leader was doing media design and the engineer
worked on the lighting, and the choreographer was just as much a project
leader. The researchers were doing choreography. As is the case in such
collaborative projects, we often took on slightly different roles and had to
learn to function within and beyond our own fields of expertise. In hindsight, though, one could argue that a stricter, more linear way of working
might have been more effective in developing a finished 'multimedia' production. Had the logistics of the project been more thoroughly anticipated
and planned, our medley might also have been easier to perform.
ICTs in the learning context of Ballectro meant that both teaching, learning, making a performance and researching were different
aspects of the same project. Interdisciplinary collaborative projects
which involve experimental new media have a tendency to turn established roles of teachers and learners upside down. In such an experimental project, nobody is an expert, and everybody has to learn
from one another to be able to the work collaboratively. In the Ballectro project, stepping out of one's own professional roles was required for creating a climate for collaboration and workshopping.
From the media side of the project, it was necessary to learn about
dance, choreography, and performance to be able to think about the
media as an integrated part of the performance. The choreographer
and dancers had to learn about digital media to be able to see possible relationships between the dance and the media.
Practice and performance spaces

The actual bodily movement of real people, and not only the screen-based
design of digital media, was an important dimension in the collaboration.
On many occasions the choreographer answered our questions by dancing,
by moving, by using gesture and by drawing. We gradually learned by
her example, and by watching the students also moving and learning
how central thinking with the body is to choreography, dance design and
performance. This was most important in rethinking our own understanding and design of digital media in the learning processes of the project and
in the performance context. As will be discussed later in the chapter, this
also further influenced our approaches to communicating research online.
The movement in an actual physical space (the large dance stage at

Statens balletthgskole, or the Intermedia tv studio with its smaller 'stage'
area) provided the research project with a means of bringing design and research of ICTs into several interesting spatial relationships and contexts. The
two performance spaces differed in size and quality. As far as dance was
concerned, the larger professional stage at Statens balletthgskole was superior, but it needed to be booked and was in great demand. In contrast, the
cold concrete floor of the tv-studio, now called the studio, was more of a private rehearsal space where it was possible to leave equipment which had already been set-up. At various points in the project, the multimedia-related
equipment had to be hauled between this studio and the stage at Statens balletthgskole, and re-purposed for that different context. So much for 'mobile
media' in all this shifting of equipment in a project about movement!
We have described and discussed some of the media related components of Ballectro in an online paper (Morrison et al. 2001). Here we refer to three examples only. At Statens balletthgskole, we tried out interactive Flash animations with different movements and shapes.10 The
animations were projected at the back wall on the stage, and the students were asked to select items from the computer and to interpret
their movements and to improvise on the basis of them. Further, these
selections were randomly generated by the software. Some of the students felt that the movements in the animations restricted them instead
of giving them material for new movement. Given time constraints,
these activities were not followed up in the way originally planned: we
tended to move along with the dance at this point. However, some of
these animations were used in the final performances but as scenography to a choreography inspired by the postcards exercise described at
the start of the chapter.
We also introduced a projected live camera to the teaching. The camera
was placed upside down at a certain angle to the back wall. This created a
visual feedback effect. The students needed to find out how their movements
could work together with the video. They quickly found ways of moving
ones that were clearly also producing and developing a strong aesthetic
that they probably would not have found out without the feedback. Example
of this can be seen in Figures 4 and 5 below in the form of Willson Phiri's
boxing-match with his upside-down self, and Erlend Samnen's generation
of his own dance moves from seeing them multiplied in front of him.
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As with the animated shapes in Flash, this video feedback was developed into a part of the final performances. So too was the use of
'spatial video' in the live filming and projection of close-ups from group
and duet sequences. Auslander (1999) has discussed 'liveness' in performance and media. In the actual final performances we wanted to maintain a
feel of the importance of improvisation and liveness, of its performativity.
In The Analysis of Performance Art, Howell (1999: 229) argues that:
A key question for performance artists must be, how do we keep the improvisation diverse, how do we ensure that even our most spontanesous
actions read ambiguously, so that our audience finds it difficult to decide
whether it is watching something improvised or something rehearsed.
Repeatedly, we found that the relationships between movement and the

media were strongly interdependent, and there was a knack to their cocomposition.
Figure 4 & 5: (left)Willson Phiri boxing with himself at the first

upside-down camera session at the Ballethgskole, fall 2001.
(right) Erlend Samnen at the first upside down camera session at the Ballethgskole, fall 2001. Notice the feedback effect
on the graphics from the camera display.
We also invited students to film with DV cameras while they danced. We
wanted to try out how they would move with the cameras, as dancers and not
from the standpoint of more traditional video. We were able to see how this
dance looked form the point of movement of the dancers; this would be inaction, inside footage. We used this event to suggest to the students that they
should be thinking of how to 'see through' other aspects of the use of digital
media in the project. We also suggested that this would be a likely need in
understanding and practising the future interplay of dance and technology.
Figure 6: (left) Malin Rengsedt and Beta Kretovivov film a

duet between Stephanie Sund and Koshiwayi Sabuneti; Beta
Kretovivov films a solo imporvisation by Erlend Samnen.
This inverting of camera and dancing with images of live images point
to how important it is not to take technology and tools as a given, but to
see them as felxibel and mallable, despite their boundedness. Similarly,
if interdiscilinary teaching and research into ICTs is to succeed, it is
important to let go of a certain degree of certainty and to step forth with
some security given by a collaborative partner.
Performance and context
One 'performance', two contexts

As the project developed, we decided to use the studio at InterMedia
and the stage and rehearsal studios at Statens balletthgskole as a performance spaces. This decision was made for practical reasons: the
dancers needed room in which to keep developing their project and we
needed a stable testing ground in which equipment did not have to be
removed from the practice space immediately after the session.
This was possible at InterMedia, yet the studio venue there was not designed as a dance space: it was smaller than the stage at the dance school,
and its hard floor was not kind on dancers' feet. However, the studio provided the project with its own space for rehearsing, and for accentuating the
place of digital media and research in the project. Further, this brought
dancers into a research setting, and also allowed colleagues from the department to see our work in progress, as dance, as digital media and as an
exploratory research project. The decision to move between two unalike
spaces was also made because we intended that the work also be performed
in two different contexts, one connected with research and the other dance.
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Production with research

However, this shifting context in which the project was being developed also
added extra levels to an already complex project process. In the research
context around InterMedia, the project was not easy to categorise and, with a
very small budget, technical needs had to be redefined. The project could
only proceed on the basis of many technical compromises. While this was at
times frustrating for all the participants, the project was designed as an exploratory learning and design collaboration between new partners over a
short period. In addition, we were working to develop a student performance
piece in which digital media was not meant to over-shadow their dancing. In
the context of Statens balletthgskole, we felt that our piece was seen more
as a danced choreography than as aa dance-media hybrid.
The project did not fit easily into the existing structures of the two institutional contexts. Yet, as a whole, the project was useful in piloting the
needs of such action-based research in a new research centre, where many
facilities had yet to be used experimentally, and where working with digital
media production and research into electronic arts had not been part of the
main concerns of either research or production. The project also brought
research on choreography and digital media into the dance school.
Performance for research

Improvisation for researchers
One of the difficulties of this project was explaining the importance of

improvisation and experimentation in the medley of dance, learning and
digital media: as learning, as design and as research.
We decided one way to do this was to bring the project out of the studio
in the basement of InterMedia and into the central public space of the
building. The six students improvised dance in this space for approximately
fifteen minutes. The space includes the entrance and the canteen as well as a
flight of three levels of stairs open to the other areas, and linked with glass
elevators. This offered people many points from which to view the improvisation. It also allowed the dancers to move across and up and down public
spaces and to draw our attention to our own typical movements across
them. The improvisation took place without music and against the backdrop
of the daily activities of this pubilic arena. The students ran up and down the
stairs, following some pre-arranged moves. At times they followed a
movement one of them had begun. They fell to the floor. They wrapped
themselves around the bannisters and descended the staircase in a large
moving mass. One of the students raced up to the top of the stairs way
above the onlookers and shouted out into the roof of the glass atrium. Others danced in and around the elevators, pressing the buttons, holding open
the doors and breaking the rules of polite public use. People going about
their business walked right into this improvisation and responded to it differently. The leader of an ICT and learning project was physically drawn
into the dance. As the improvisation piece came to a close, the large group
of onlookers began to return to offices, labs and meeting rooms.
The student dancers also introduced improvisation at an interval in a
seminar on Mobility held at InterMedia in November 2001.11 The students had been invited to perform an improvised piece to highlight aspects of human movement and artistic expression through dance. On
this occasion, however, they performed in the open air, in a large courtyard hemmed in by glass walls and set into a well in the main entrance
level of the research park. Participants in the research seminar on mobility were asked to leave the warmth of the seminar room and to move
outside to see a dance piece on mobility and improvisation. As part of
their improvisation, the students used the air streams from a large ventilation system cone, and blew leaves, paper and other objects into the air.
The audience, looking down on the performers, was encouraged to throw
chocolates, paper balls and empty cardboard boxes down into the space.
The students then reacted to some of these immobile objects. They also
took photographs during their performance. These were later used in an installation the students made in the canteen at Statens balletthgskole as part
of their contextualising of the project for their end of year performance.
Performance for researchers

Having introduced Ballectro as dance to a research context through
improvisation, the project was now introduced as dance and media
to teachers, graduate students and researchers through a research
seminar entitled 'Designing Design' which we also arranged. This
seminar discussed how different fields of design may inform research and development in digital media, and how we may employ
approaches from design to investigate, analyse and understand digital technologies and their uses. It also asked in what ways an inte-
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grated approach to design can help us to conceptualise and practice

the use of ICTs in communication, learning and culture. Papers for
this seminar were published in electronic form only. The media researchers in the Ballectro project used this occasion to present the
project from an online research paper. The paper concentrated on
collaboration and the role of digital media in the project (see Morrison 2001). For us, the overall seminar was a means of building an
electronic resource of academic publications around design and
digital media. We were able to present material on the media components of the project as well as its collaborative and participatory
design. This 'design of design' was then extended at the close of the
seminar with the first full public performance of the dance piece.
The researchers, then, shifted their roles from the seminar and became performers of a different kind (mixing sound, video, projection, and computer files).
Figure 7: Video still from a trio, performance at the Designing

Design seminar, InterMedia,28 February 2001; dancers: Malin
Rengstedt (back) and Koshiwayi Sabuneti (front).
Lasting roughly 20 minutes, the performance was specifically for the

seminar participants and other interested researchers. This gave these
researchers the possibility of 'performing the text as an audience', and
not reading about it in a report or article form. Video material of this
performance is to be found on the Ballectro website under development. We invite readers of this chapter to interrupt their current role as
readers of print academic discourse, and to see a mediated form of the
performance by visiting the 'Performances' section of the Ballectro web.
This interruption is a deliberate part of our wider argument about
the possibilities to move between layers of discourse and discourse
types in research which is about and in digital media and performance. Our presentation of this chapter at the SKIKT conference, for
which this book has been prepared is a further attempt to cross
boundaries between print and electronic discourse, between presentation and performance, and between production and interpretation.
Figure 8: The studio space at InterMedia after the Ballectro

performance at the Designing Design seminar, 28 November 2001.
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Performance for dance
From research to dance context

Following these improvisations and the performance for researchers at
the University of Oslo, we now moved to the performance setting of
Statens balletthgskole. This was a shift in context, in terms of space,
technology, performance and audience. This shift also impacted on our
understanding the mechanics of the project as well as the interpretation
of the performance piece.
While Ballectro was given prominence by being the opening piece
in the annual student concert, it was very clear to us as media developers and researchers that we had entered an entirely different learning
and performance settting. This proved to be important in two main respects. The first concerned technical adjustment. The second refers to
the multi-level choreography and multimedia character of the piece
being placed in an established dance performance schedule.
Moving to the larger and wider stage, and the fact that our performance would be replaced by another scenography, meant that we had to
reconfigure the entire technical arrangement of the work. Although we
knew the dimensions of the stage from having rehearsed there, we had
to alter the screens we had made to fit this space. However, we did not
change their size as we would have liked to have done. We also quickly
realised that due to the scale of the performance space having expanded, the dance itself would open out. Similarly, our use of digital
media would need to accommodate a broadening of movement. Most
importantly, this meant that a second, more powerful computer projector had to be added to the technical repertoire. This was so that the
computer projected material would be bright enough to be seen by a
nightly audience (of about 150 persons). This audience was also likely
to be more critical of the dance and choreography, and the ways in
which multimedia enhanced or detracted from them.
As the piece was to be followed by an entirely different dance, the set
for Ballectro, including expensive computer equipment also had to be
taken down in minutes by the non-dancers in the project. This was quite a
different kind of performance for us as researchers to conduct over six
nights. While in its processes of composition the piece had been frequently
restructured, now we repeatedly re-performed the same structured piece.
Figure 9: Stills from a Ballectro performance at Statens balletthgskole. The dancers (above) are multipled on the back screen via
video projection of live camera feed. The dancer (below), Beta
Kretovivov, observes the projection of a previously recorded
digital video of herself dancing. In Icelandic and Slovenian, she
questions her own moving self. Simultaneously, music (compressed
and accelerated sound built from her own voice) plays.
While so far we had called the piece and the project Ballectro, suggesting a merger of dance and electronic media, the students and the
choreographer now decided the piece needed a different, and less bal-
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let-like name. After much debate we settled on the title 'flsj frash'.
This pointed to two aspects of the performance. The first was that we
had used the software Flash to develop part of the dance, but of course
the possible 'Flashdance' was the title of an entirely different Hollywood film from the 1980s. Second, the title 'flsj frash' referred first to the
Norwegian spelling of Flash and, in a playful other senses, to one pronounciation of the word by a Zimbabwean speaker of Shona suggesting 'coolness'. This allowed us to refer to the Norwegian and Zimbabwean participants in the project, though the nuances in this title may be partly missed.
Another change we met was that our formerly contained performance piece now joined a medley of others in an established dance performance schedule geared towards a dance community. In this context,
we were also finally able to see our work in relation to other choreographies, some developed by the staff and two based on the work of
the well-known Norwegian chorographer, Jo Strmgren.
An additional, and difficult, change for us as researchers who had
driven the digital media part of the performance was that in this performance context some of the technical control now needed to pass into
the hands of a lighting and sound specialists contracted by Statens balletthgskole. This meant, especially as regards sound, that we were no
longer able to integrate all the elements of what was a multi-level choreography and multimedia performance ourselves. Used to mixing thes
elements in tune with the dancers and other media, we now saw how
separate many dance performances are from their creators. Perhaps this
is no surprise to choreographers and lighting and sound specialists.
Performing research
Reporting research in online environments

There is a small, if growing body of research about conducting online research (e.g. Jones 1999, Mann & Stewart 2000, Hakken 1999; see also this
volume). This print based material is chiefly concerned with how to carry
out a range of research methods in primarily Internet based domains. Applied research is presented but little mention is made of visual media (see
e.g. Pink 2001) or of building a multi-mediational research rhetoric. Such
an argument is to be found in several online journals concerned with scholarly publication and digital discourse (e.g. Gailin & Latchaw 1998, Ingra-
ham 2002). However, as Morrison (2001) has argued, few electronic journals in the humanities and social sciences make apt use of images in their
web-based mediation of research. In addition, fewer still employ video
material as part of an electronic research rhetoric (e.g. Owens 2000).
Digital video and audio were used to document aspects of Ballectro. Still
and moving images were an important part of reflecting on the learning and
work process as well as the performances.12 We used the projection of recorded and projected video to help us decide how to shape the larger choreography; reviewing footage also helped in selecting and refining material
for the piece. Drawings, sketches, and notes were used to keep track of a
complex process. For some of the period a sociologist observed our sessions, and although given the density of the project his role as a video
documenter was not fulfilled, he nevertheless introduced important questions about participant observation in a performance-driven project. Dance
itself was also a mode of memory-making: the repeat movements, the rehearsals and the need to 'learn' the piece as non-dancers forced the multimedia developers to put down their notebooks and cameras. In addition to the
video material filmed by the researchers, at times the students also filmed
their own dance movements as well as the contexts in which their learning
was taking place at Statens balletthgskole. Video was also used in several
workshop activities to highlight issues of presentation, and improvisation,
though video-playback of dance was rarely used. Elements of the dance
were repeated with changes and different expressions. This reflexive development design also filtered into the ways in which we also worked as participants and as participant observers ourselves.
However, face-to-face discussions and actual 'rehearsals' in the
workshop sessions were the most frequent means of making sense of
the ongoing process. The aim of using digital video was not to produce
a fully documented multimedia ethnography online, though such tools
now enable us to follow research and learning trajectories via the web.
However, building a multimedia-rich website (now underway) was one
way of documenting aspects of the project: as a means of record for the
dance school and as an aid to future learning and research projects
(Ballectro 2002). We were also trying to perform research rhetorically,
by way of experimenting with how to present it in an online setting.
Thus we aimed to generate an example of how one approach to projectbased research may be communicated in a digital domain. In particular, as
the Ballectro website demonstrates, we needed to find a fit between the
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content, the process and the medium so as to reduce some of the distance
between a partly digitally mediated performance and its interpretation.
Extending performance based research

This chapter, therefore also, lies within the evolving Ballecto project
website. It too is part of a wider project at InterMedia to build capacities for designing research materials for online communication. Not
only would we need to establish how and where and why to use still images, but these questions would also apply to video, and the quality, size
and streaming of files. Thus, we needed to select material from the process
and the performances. We linked them with research papers, such as this
one, as well as to other research on dance and digital media available online. In short, we were trying to develop a prototype to demonstrate how
the web is a medium within which a convergence between the research
processes and products may be constructed, and thus also interpreted.
Jones and Stephenson (1999: 8) argue that:
Interpretation is, we would argue, a kind of performance of the object,
while the performance of the body as an artistic practice is a mode of
textual inscription. The body (as the corporeal enactment of the subject) is
known and experienced only through its representational performances
whether presented 'live,' in photographs, videos, films, on the computer
screen, or through the interpretive text itself. Interpretation, like the production of works of art, is a mode of communication. Meaning is a process of engagement and never dwells in any one place.
With respect to Ballectro, such 'interpretation' may be seen at two levels. First, the project may be read as an instance of what we call 'performance based research'.13 Second, we suggest that it may be useful to
broaden the electronic reporting of media-rich ICT-related research to
include performance.
Future steps
Electronic rhetoric and hermeneutics

In researching about dance and digital media, we were somewhat surprised at what we did not find online. While many dance sites exist, including those which discuss dance and technology (e.g. the Dance &
Technology Zone), few of them have high quality images. Rarely does
one come across a dance site filled with images and text which contextualises these images.14 We imagined that we might also find video
material on dance online, but this was even harder to find.15
There would still appear to be relatively few examples of dance online in which digital media is prominent but also where a multimediated
dance may be said to be represented (see e.g. deLahunta 1998a, Birringer 2002) and analysed (Sha & Kuzmanovic 2000). Online examples
of the documentation of dance in context, such as that from the Department of Dance at Ohio State University (2002) also exist, particularly with reference to dance and digital media workshops (Birringer
2002). Robbie Shaw (2002) has a five and a half minute web dance
video called 'Time train'. Re-mediating the genre of a silent film, the
piece has chorographic input from its performers. Further, this webscreened video was edited digitally. In another work, called 'Panic skid',
Jennifer Marshall and Robbie Shaw (1999) present two dance videos
which run simultaneously and which are surrounded by text.
The documentation of electronic arts projects is an important part of
building its history and its rhetoric (e.g. Dpocas, 2001). However, unlike many of the performance pieces of the 1960s and even 1970s,
digital video, stills and audio now offer handier and cheaper means for
documenting performance-based projects, and especially the corporeality of dance, and their mediation online. There are now several projects
on the documentation of choreography and related dance performances.
The Norwegain dance and multimedia performer Amanda Steggell and
her collaborators provide a close-to-home example of how a performance work may be viewed online; in 'Maggie's Love Bites'16 the online
mediation is part of the message (see also deLahunta 1996). This is well
illustrated in a cd-rom based documentation of choreography for work
entitled 'A Desparate Heart'. Similar is an instructional cd-rom 'Prey: an
innovation in dance documentation' on the choreography of Bebe
Miller (Mockebee 2002). This cd-rom contains notes, each of which
displays Bebe teaching or coaching the dancers alongside the Labanotation phrase, a complete edited video of the group work, historical, cultural contexts, interview with Miller, review by Candace Feck, Miller's
World, and brief instances of the process and moments of the original
long phrase that Miller and the students created.
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Such an approach is also taken over to dvd in a title called 'Going to the
wall a document of the process', again referring to a work by Bebe Miller.
Such experimental research and performance settings provide us
with a 'laboratory' space within which to conceptualise the changing
character of dance and digital media. In particular, they also provide us
with research driven contexts based on practice linked with theory.
These contexts provide actual, populated interdisciplinary spaces for
the embodiment of the synthetic-analytic model Gunnar Liestl (2001,
2002 forthcoming) proposes is so important in digital media production
and analysis. 'Peformance' may thus be seen to be extended beyond the
role of the dancer and the static, seated audience.
Responsive digital media and performance

'Performance' may thus be seen to be extended beyond the established and
assigned roles of the dancer and the static, seated audience to a more plastic
relationship between tools and tellers, performers and the audience as performative players who may enter a performance space and piece and traverse the divide between the stage and the spectator. This can be seen in the
collaborative works of Sponge and FoAM (sic). These are interdisciplinary
and collaborative research and design teams working with digital media.
'Tgarden' is one of their interesting performance based project wesbites (Sha & Kuzmanovic 2000, Sha et al. 2000).17 This site, and their
others, presented us with prototypical examples of performance, including dance, digital media and web mediation are co-present. Importantly, the 'Tgarden' project site stresses the importance of responsitivity in
digitally mediated performance. A collaborative and interdisciplinary research, technical and artistic venture, 'Tgarden' investigates:
how people individually and collectively make sense of responsive, hybrid media environments by articulating their knowledge in non-verbal ways.
More specifically, the project investigates how a person can create meaningful gestures in a dynamic environment and develop expertise in them.18
This can be seen in the videos which accompany this explanatory verbal text. In a section of their website entitled 'Transforming the tool',
Sponge state that 'We're interested in making it possible for someone
who is trying to "write", in the broadest sense, to refashion the tools of
writing him or herself. A reflexivity of action.'
Sponge and FoAM presented us with digitally mediated research discourse in which digital media was employed to communicate the research
content and context. In short, it demonstrates a web-related contextualisation of interests and publication types similar to ours. In their own words,
the web site is a hybrid and augmented space, but not just about performance but also as the performance of their research. This is apparent in their
publication of a conference paper bearing video material from the performance (by the audience) as well as slides from the presentation of the paper.
Two of the project members, Sha and Kuzmanovic (2000), argue that
'By shifting attention from representation to performance, we shift the focus of design from technologies of static representation (e.g. snap-shot database schemas with data from forms), to technologies of creation and performance.' As deLahunta argues, (and as we have experienced as learners,
designers and researchers), arts education, including dance and media,
needs to be broadened to include the problems and approaches we have
tried to contextualise here as part of an ongoing shift in our literacies. He
demonstrates this himself in an online piece as a 'temporary typology practice' referring to dance and digital media. He links a presentation text with
its presentation notes, video footage and web links (see deLahunta 1998a).
Dymanic perfomative discourse

As Susan Kozel (1997) says, 'How do we map the body of dance as it
expands its representational systems?' How too are we to do this for
digital media? That is for dance and media as artistic and as academic
texts? Now that dance cds and dvds and research projects and publications have begun to demonstrate links between choreography and its
performance, we hope that it will be possible to stretch this further and
take some new steps into a dynamic, electronic and responsive performance. This may be the case in a proposed collaboration with three
choreography students in the fall of 2002 in which they will each develop a choreography for other students to dance. At present we are still
to learn about their interests, but their chreography teacher has asked us
to collaborate with them in working on renaissance material. At present
we are calling this the Piazza project. Piazza might be one site in which
we can further investigate relationships between dance and digital media design, and also perhaps learn how to work and to develop more responsive multimedia dance spaces and performances.
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From the point of view of research and pedagogy on digital media, through the Ballectro project we learned to perform, to research
performance and to perform research. A future interdisciplinary and
collaborative multimedia-dance project such as Piazza might result in 'a
site' in which research processes, accounts, performances and interpretation are connected with an electronically mediated rhetoric. In such
future steps, we would also hope to embody the performing of research
so that 'moving media', responsive performers and audiences might also
be 'players' in its making and interpretation, stepping between digitaldance and digitally mediated dymanic research texts. That, however, is
a matter of a different time, space and context.
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Notes
1
Ballectro is a project funded by the KTK initiative, housed at InterMedia at

the University of Oslo. KTK stands for 'Communication: Technology & Culture', a programme funded by SKIKT. According to original documentation,
KTK 'focuses on the interfaces between the traditional subject areas. The central effort is therefore directed towards the development, application and
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analysis of communication technology in the light of historical/philosophical,

linguistic/symbolic, societal, political, legal, ethical, pedagogical and technological factors. This applies to both the conditions for and the consequences of
such technology. The aim of this priority area is to develop new competence
through interdisciplinary research with a view to meeting the needs of society
for new teaching provision, mediation, publicising and further research.'
Statens balletthgskole also contributed to the funding of the project. Information
on Statens balletthgskole may be found at: http://www.khio.no/ballett/index.html.
The Ballectro project website is at: www.intermedia.projects/ballectro.htm. Our
thanks to Brd Ketil Engen for comments on the chapter.
2
Statens balletthgskole (known in English as the National College of Ballet
and Dance) is part of the Kunsthyskole in Oslo. In this chapter will use the
Norwegian name.
3
Workshops are being used as part of the building of the Ballectro website;
students from the project will be partly involved in this process.
4
Marita Liulia, Kimmo Pohjonen and Aki Suzuki's Performance Manipulator
(at Kiasma, ARS01, Helsiniki, Finland) is a combination of concert, exhibition, media, and dance performance. It involves a similar mixing of art forms
and ways of performing we found interesting in Ballectro. The Manipulator
artists also combine traditional artforms (dance, visuals, music) with new technology. Available at: http://www.kiasma.fi/ars/manipulator/index.php
5
The 'Context' section of the PARIP website summarises this:
The pursuit of practice as research / practice-based research (PAR /
PBR) has become increasingly important during the past ten years to
the research cultures of the performing arts (drama, theatre, dance, music) and related disciplines involving performance media (film, video,
television, radio) as the contribution of the arts and cultural industries to
national health and prosperity has climbed up the political agenda. A
growing number of performing arts / media departments in higher education are now offering higher degrees which place practice at the heart
of their research programmes. This represents a major theoretical and
methodological shift in the performance disciplines traditional approaches to the study of these arts are complemented and extended by
research pursued through the practice of them.
See: http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/#context
6
See: http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/#context
7
The SKIKT conference website is at:
http://www.intermedia.uio.no/konferanser/skikt-02/skikt-research-conferance.html
8
For example, Tronstad (2002, forthcoming) suggests that the concept performance is only partially useful in conceptualising online MUD adventures.

9
Details of choreography and dance aspects will be addressed elsewhere, as

will a focus on learning.
10
For more detail on the media aspects of the project, see Morrison et al. (2001).
11
This seminar and the one mentioned hereafter on design were both part of
the KTK Assemblages project, funded through the SKIKT programme.
12
We documented parts of the process while the project unfolded. DV cameras
were used to record aspects of the different sessions. Mostly the documentation was
carried out as general observation without direct interviews of the students. The
documentation is valuable for several reasons. It demonstrates a creative process but
also miscommunication. We documented less and less towards the end of the project as we started to run low on people to fill the different roles, and do specific tasks.
Another reason for the decline in documentation was the gradual change from a
creative process to rehearsals. Towards the live performances more effort was put
into making the performances actually work the way we wanted than on the recording of the process. Given our time boundaries, recording and interviewing the
participants tended to break concentracion and to use up rehearsal time.
13
Here we do not mean the kind which is inherent in research assessment exercises such as conducted in British universities.
14
In contrast, for example, performance artists and groups, such as the Norwegian based Motherboard, have used the web to link real-time performances to
websites with scripts and a range of different performance types to build dynamic environments. (see http://www.notam02.no/motherboard/). Troika
ranch, for example, has a salon on projects (see:
http://www.troikaranch.org/websalon2.html) and also provides a different image each day (see: http://www.troikaranch.org/yearbody.html).
15
Perhaps, the tradition of dance for film and the video of dance for television
offer dancers higher quality images and more satisfying representations of choreographies and their performances.
16
From online notes to this piece:
M@ggie's Love Bytes has developed through the group's engagement
in net life, and tries to cater for a great amount, and diversity of traffic/inter-activity during the performance. The ongoing process of running the show is embedded in the expression of the piece (words such
as open, close, fetch, connect, disconnect, and icons such as the running
dog in FTP, and the open and closed eye in CU-SeeMe, appear on the
wall, adding an extra dimension to whatever may be happening just
then). All these features form an integral part of net life as we know it.
And this is the point: M@ggie's Love Bytes is in fact a regular dance
theatre performance of the 90's which dares to reflect upon, and perform through our digitally-connected lives as they happen - now! How-
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ever, what makes this project unique is the (re-claimed) power of the
moving, gesturing human body in cyberspace, embodied in the dancers.
At: http://www.notam02.no/~amandajs/where.html
17
Synne Skjulstad and Albertine Aaberge were able to become players in this
responsive media and dance work at Ars Electronica in Linz, September 2001.
18
At: http://www.sponge.org/events_m3_tgarden.htm. See also:
http://titanium.lcc.gatech.edu/topologicalmedia/tgarden/index.html
BLANK

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Figure 1: Willson Phiri & Stephanie Sund in a digitally enhanced

Researching ICTs in Context