Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited  is  a Live Performance Series choreographed by Web code.
In the performance of  facebook.com  on March 3, 2009, three dancers, the audience, and the artist shaped together the course of the performance.
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.
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 #8 - www.facebook.com
 
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Layout of the performance space at Light Industry. Click to see a docu of the show.     

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

Seating for the audience was scattered within and around the dotted areas and lines which described the dancers' path. Each station/area was interlinked with the other - resembling the facebook logo of connected continents. The performance space consisted of three main areas: In the entrance area, the HTML tags of facebook's live 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. And in the third area, the already into descriptions interpreted movements were again translated into dance.

Corresponding to the core idea of facebook, the public is an intrinsic part of the event and was invited to influence the course of the show. The audience could sit down (joining the artist) at the table of the html-movement-library, and entry their own interpretations of the solo-dancer's movements into the database. These entries were automatically integrated into the data transfer and became immediatley available for the performance.

The performance of facebook took place at Theater of Code, curated by Christiane Paul for Light Industry in Brooklyn, New York.
Dancers: Irem Calikusu, Melissa Lohman, Yuki Kawahisa

Full Production Credits.