Call for Participants

A Day in the Life :: Streaming performance event :: @ Upgrade! International :: November 30, 3-5pm (Oklahoma City time) :: We are developing A DAY IN THE LIFE as a platform for simultaneous global performances and as a base for international collaborations. Urban spaces in Munich, Oklahoma City, Boston and Istanbul will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the event.

At each location, local activity in and around the space is formally framed and streamed to all other locations. Thus the audience in each location sees the activities in four international cities at one time, and the full performance is only complete when viewing all four locations simultaneously.

The simple act of framing causes the viewer to impart the activities of daily life with meaning, following Marcel Duchamp's dictum: "It is the viewers who make the pictures... The construction of meaning is however aided by focusing on specific themes. This is done through targeted media interventions and activities that take place at all four locations simultaneously, and that at pre-arranged times react to a common theme. Daily life becomes a performance of itself.

Local activities will be framed by the lens of the video camera, but additionally, if the interior space has a view into the exterior space, for instance through a storefront window, the physical frame of the window can also define the exterior space as a stage for the activities.

Activities will ideally dynamically engage each local interior space with its respective exterior space, whether engaging passers-by in street performances or luring them inside as participants.

The full performance, viewed over all four locations at once, becomes a synergistic confrontation of chance occurrences at each location with the prepared interventions, plus the inevitable cultural differences between the four locations that become apparent as reactions to the common theme.

A DAY IN THE LIFE locates the global in the local. The peculiarities and characteristics of the location at which a given viewer happens to be are contrasted with the typical and untypical aspects of another location, another city, another country, coalescing into a poetic fusion.

A DAY IN THE LIFE creates connections, discovering the familiar in the foreign and the foreign in the familiar. It transforms your local streetcorner into part of a Do-It-Yourself global stage.

Concept:: Horst Konietzny & Tamiko Thiel

MoreMX.com / InterLake GmbH of Munich (Germany) and Jacksonville, Florida (USA) will be providing technical support and the streaming video server.

INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE CONCEPTS: