Manifesto
We are No-Net and we aim to make pieces that use the technology of computers and the World Wide Web to prove their own damaging effects. We aim to expose the bad and negative ways in which “performance” occurs on the internet.
Our company could perhaps be said to have some bias due to our own personal inabilities to function well with technology, however we truly believe that as we have researched further and further into internet material, we have become more and more angered by what we have viewed. We have also re-affirmed a lot of the reasons why we feel both enraged and scared by the increased use of the internet as a performance tool. This has in essence prompted the intentions behind our company; we want to expose the internet for what it really is. It is true the internet may help us improve our everyday lives to some extent but there is a lot of bad stuff out there too. We want people to be aware of this and perhaps start to question whether they themselves are being absorbed into a virtual world.
It is interesting to note that the consideration of technology as art only really began to emerge around WWI. It came from a new found obsession with mechanics which can be seen in the work of Meyerhold and also Schlemmers dancers of the Bauhaus. The Futurists movement can be seen to praise the technological age feeling it was their new art form. At this point in history it is easy to appreciate how these new found technologies were viewed with such excitement. However, the technological age has developed so rapidly over less than a century, that cyberspace and virtual mediums have (to at least the Western world) evolved towards becoming second nature. There are now even virtual worlds on the internet that in our opinion are allowing people to avoid normal social contact and live their spare time as avatars in highly developed virtual worlds. This proves how relationships between the body and the machine are now viewed. Zylinska states, ‘this perception of technologies as “extensions of man”, of our “inner selves” has allowed for a rethinking of the inner/outer distinction that was supposed to separate man from “his” technologies.’ (2002:2) Globalisation associated with post modernity has led to a new thinking about mans position in the world, its sense of belonging and relationship with other life forms. We truly believe that this is leading to an unstable, unsociable society.
We believe in the words of Schechner who writes ‘I do not think I am alone in desiring the intensity of communication and shared emotion of live theatre. Nor am I the only one enjoying the precipitous dangers of live performance.’ (1997:6) Our company is aiming to eventually seek to draw people back to live performance and feel the best way to do this is to highlight the dangers of people feeling they are able to “perform” in an unselective virtual medium.
In this particular project we have set up a blog entitled ‘Homage to the Internet’ and within this created imaginary characters for ourselves who we have made out to be internet lovers. Through our imaginary characters FiFi and Gwynnie we are aiming to create a blog site in which we will highlight all the increased uses of the internet and its interlinked technologies that we feel have negative impacts on society. The project as a whole will then culminate into an internet performance in the form of an amateur home-made video filmed of us as our characters; this will then be uploaded onto our blog. Within this video we are highlighting the way that we believe people are creating a performance on the internet and have entitled the piece “Performing on the Internet”.
When approaching this project we felt that having a satirical approach to the material would create a greater impact. We also aimed to make our characters have comedic value as we felt that a light-hearted rather than negative approach would capture more people’s attention and spread our message more effectively to more people. We wanted to create a performance in which there was comedy surrounding the negative material and have sought to achieve a flow of dialogue, videos, pictures and news clips that create a state where the audience begins laughing but gradually realises that what they are laughing at is not actually funny.
Through our characters we have explored several issues such as chat rooms, fake identity, blogging, happy slapping, youtube and gaming in an aim to highlight the extent to which these field can be pushed to their worst; something which internet users are not giving enough consideration to. It is our aim to make people, especially those who have a great love affair with the net, take a step back and consider it for what it sometimes can be; a tool for dangerous actions leading to very serious consequences.
Eventually it would be our aim to spread these blogs throughout cyberspace and also perhaps to use the function of our own website. No-net would also like to become able to do more projects to promote live performance and interactive performance (away from the virtual) to improve people’s social skills and rejuvenate the power of human-human interaction.
Bibliography:
Schechner, R. (1997) ‘Theatre in the 21st Century’ TDR (1988-), 41, (2/Summer), pp.5-6.
Zylinska, J. (2002) The Cyborg Experiments – the extensions of the body in the media age Continuum:
