Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited  is  a Live Performance Series choreographed by Web code.
In the performance of  live.com  on June 6, 2009, two dancers, two performers, and the audience, joined me to shape together the course of the show.
The source code of the website - its HTML tags - were interpreted live on stage into new dance movements, which were immediately translated into text-based descriptions and then stored online into the (text-based) html-movement-library. This information was reused on stage as new instruction material. As the data performance progressed, more html-movements were developed, stored and altered by the participants, and then recycled yet anew...
The inclusion of the html-movement-library on stage enabled a simultaneous exchange of instruction and performance, data and movement input and output, and a continuous transfer between Web and body.

 
  Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited     # 1,  2,  3, 4, 5, 6, 7,  8, 9, 10 |
    html-movement-library (video-based) /  html-movement-library (text-based) |
   home/ursenal |
 
Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited #3 - www.live.com
 
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Draft (Invite) and layout of the performance space. Click to see a docu of the show.     

   Click on thumbnails (then click next) to view all large photos and video stills.

The performance space consisted of three main areas which were visually inspired by that week's home page on live.com showing the image of an icy surface with round piles of snow. In the back area, the HTML tags of live's Website were interpreted "on the fly" by a solo-dancer into movements. In the center area, these movements were interpreted into text and saved to the database. In the third area, the already into descriptions interpreted movements were again translated into dance. In a forth area key moments of the already translated movements were taken even further and re-interpreted yet again by two performers...

The public was invited to influence the course of the show and could join me at the html-movement-library. Typing into a laptop placed on a stand in the center of the performance space they could access and feed the online archive. The audience's entries -- their own interpretations of the solo-dancer's movements -- were automatically integrated into the data transfer and became immediately available for the performance.

The sound was a mix of different sources, a score composed by the live source code of Live.com. Each HTML tag from the site was musically interpreted. Tags such as HTML or SCRIPT were translated into music by reading their letters as a musical score. Letters which did not match those of the musical scale were interpreted by a different theme. On another acoustic layer a computer voice was reading aloud the directions from the database. On yet another level resided the live-mix of the online work "html_butoh."

The performance of live.com took place at an open studio event called studios on view in New York City.
Performers: Robert Appleton, Melissa Lohman, Laura Meyers, and Yuki Kawahisa.

Full Production Credits.