Artistic Environments of Telepresence on the World Wide Web

Abstract

The recent use of streaming video on the World Wide Web for the distribution of live images has enabled an interface that supports a new phenomenon of virtual, defered, remote presence, extending perception and expanding the possibilities of remote interaction. The purpose of this essay is to provide a brief survey of the use of these live images in artistic spaces specifically conceived for this medium. These environments will be presented in three different categories, which propose transformations in possibilities of participation, interference, and the participants' self-expression.

The World Wide Web, with its intrinsic capacities for interconnectivity and synchronicity has generated new possibilities for the relationship between participants, information, and technological support and provides an interactive communication space where infinite paths allow for participation in events, real-time experiences, and remote actions exploring the sensation of ubiquity and simultaneity.

We already live in a society that has continuously been exposed to and incorporated the ubiquity of telecommunications. The Internet has recently increased this tele-connectivity by allowing text, images, sound, and video exchanges with any person one wishes to connect with professionally or socially, in a practically instantaneous manner. The creation of the WWW-as a net of human relations that transcends geographic limits and incorporates real-time participation and the occurrence of events in a continuous (synchronal) or partial (non-synchronal) flow-provides the circulation of social imagination, as well as scientific information. This utilization of the Web as a social space of information exchange-managing the processes, procedures, and actions involved in the formal composition of communication-involves the users in a concept of widespread and abstract space.

For a long time, images have been "transported" by different means and have produced different forms of aesthetics, with the intent to "contain" physical space and transfer it to other supporting media such as a screen, paper, and film. With modern communication technologies, the image gains another characteristic: real time. The live image enables and links people in remote locations in a temporal phenomenon and proposes transformations in the relationships between and knowledge of people, through a "distance" and "dimension" that suggests forms of "movement" throughout the world. The use of Web cameras to generate live images introduces its own specificity and transforms the "vision"of the viewer, as it incorporates telepresence into the metaphors of these images, generating a situation where a viewer/ participant is capable of proposing a modification to a remote environment and receiving an immediate answer from it. As a result, new possibilities for users' performances are opened up through an aesthetics resulting from the synergy of non-formal elements-such as the coexistence in virtual and real spaces, the synchronicity of actions, remote control in real time, telerobotic action and remote observation in a collaborative form.

Using webcams, one encounters a real-time, constantly updated digital image, which transports information from a remote physical space where a user-despite the lack of a physical space of contact-starts to direct the potential development of events through alternative possibilities of "presence" and "encounters." The feeling of ubiquity that makes "being/acting" possible has its origins in the live images that implement a "tele-existence" in different physical spaces of contact, a feeling and sensation that can be converted into real and remote action. The images captured in real time unfold like "temporal windows," rendering virtual the interventions of users who can observe, interact, move and share other distinct "realities," regardless of the physical distances or geographic location but subjected to the speed of the connections for data transmission. According to Paul Virilio, reality became ubiquitous by simultaneously decomposing the time of the presence here and now and the telepresence beyond the "horizon of sensible appearances" [1].

The live image becomes "the horizon of sensible appearances" when it comes to enabling not only the synchronal, interactive communication over a distance (a situation already made possible by the telephone) but also the emergence of a tenuous dividing line between the several forms of "virtual/real communication" that allows users to coexist/operate in several "worlds," to...