Events :: Performance
Smartbodies: The Real Show
Montreal-Quebec, 2003
stream and on-line participation with the performance in Quebec City

In North America, popular culture is overflowing with reality shows like Survivors, the Osbournes, Lofters, Big Brother, COPS, and the six o'clock news. On the Internet, The Sims, an interactive game where users control avatars to enact everyday actions in a simulated world parodying real life, is enticing millions of users, the majority of them women. The popularity of these games and shows is perhaps reflective of the effectiveness of the monitor screen as a mediator of intimate and collective experiences.

The Real Show attempts to introduce a physical interactive component integrating the intimacy established by the screen. Unlike reality shows and games, participants/viewers are featured as the creators and participants of an unrehearsed real-time audio and video web cast where actions and communication have direct and immediate consequences on physical bodies and emotional psyches. In this show, on-line participants from Montreal give commands, via a chat room interface, for the voluntary remote participants to enact in Quebec City. The voluntary participants in Quebec City, consequently, obey, ignore or disobey the commands and express their resulting emotions, prompting the user in Montreal to respond. This two way teleaction challenges audiences/participants to critically, collectively and intimately situate themselves within physical place, technologically mediated interactive space and the screen.

Smartbodies

There is no one author, but many collaborators. Smartbodies consists of mainstream hackers, computer programmers, web designers, conceptual designers, artist-run centre organizers and technicians, event participants, performance artists, feminist and post-cyber feminist activists and theorists, plus many others.