Jeremy Wade

Jeremy Wade
“there is no end to more”

Jeremy Wade's performance was more dance and theatrical poetry than what I would presume to be performance art. The general theme that was trying to be conveyed was to be anime or Japanese animation. Growing up with Katsuhiro Otomo's “Akira” and most of Hayao Miyazaki's films of the 80's and 90's formed a clear idea of what anime was in it's most refined forms. Visually I wasn't able to find a strong connection between Wade's imagery and my idea of what anime was. The monologue at the beginning of the performance which read like a short epic visualized anime more vividly than the imagery on the three screens. The themes and plot lines laid out in an anime feature were brought to life in Wade's poetry. The monologue combined with the music, interpretative dance and the poetry were almost a cliché of what I think of as performance art. I did appreciate the physicality of what he was performing and could see parallels between his movements and that of various characters in anime movies.
I wasn't overwhelmed with the production of the performance. There are elements of New Media within the performance but I'm not sure if those elements are current enough to be considered New Media. The imagery was obviously produced digitally and projected digitally but is that enough to be considered New Media? The digital elements of the performance weren't interactive and could have be produced conventionally through an analog process and projected on screen. The animation could have been draw freehand and shot conventionally. Working digitally allows an artist to work autonomously and with greater speed and freedom to edit, change and correct their actions but do those improvements in process dramatically change the medium of the past century and make it new?
If there was interaction between the digital media and the environment of the space in real time I would begin to consider this performance to be New Media.

Principles of New Media

10 Principles of New Media.

1 The computer interface is a universal language.
“all computer users can “speak” the language of the interface”
2 “Mobility”
3 “Separate realities form consecutive moments in time”
4 “Separate realities form contingent moments in time”
5 “ different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe”
6 Scale and location are irrelevant universally equalizing things page 6
7 The medium through which we veiw a representation of reality has changed and now experience it on a electronic screen page 7
8 “Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality"
9 “ New media objects contain a hierarchy of levels, (OS, HTML, programing language, assembly language, machine language)”
10 Effects become the vocabulary by which new media conveys it's message.

Quotes are from
Lev Manovich
“The Language of New Media”

Hexapod CNC

CNC clock

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1539673/hexapod_robot_cnc_router_cutting_3d_face/