Internet Ambient
"Internet Ambient" is a performance series and practice that goes beyond how programs 'perform' themselves—stretching hypertext as a mode of performance and agency.
My 'internet ambient' performances are live presentations of internet-based art through recitations & readings, accompanied with live ambient music & participatory elements. Revealing the stage of the desktop, sites blurs into each other with the work of the human performer: the desktop becomes a sort of landscape. It is the performance of the browser, and the browser as performance; something like a desktop performance, stretched into an ambience.
( An ambience insinuates an atmosphere, suggests the making of the unknown known, and questions which network technologies and resulting behaviors have been 'naturalized'. It suggests new modes of surfing for this time; beyond the doomscroll or the dangerous passivity into an atmosphere as visible as it ubiquituous—now a medium looping, emerging, and a social space. )
Performances draw from it all: sound/experimental art, field recording & sampling techniques, the screen life genre, desktop perforamnces, durational work, poetry readings, even the performative nature of 'tech demos'.
Pieces come from both published and personal work—always, altered for performance and augmented with custom MIDI controllers and software beyond the websites itself; using screen readers, accessibility tools, machine vision, and subversions of common tech software.
Always, they attempt to reclaim control from the program to the performer/programmer/poet: more manually exhaustive than generative, treating the act of suring as sacred.
Pushing the infrastructural limits of the operating system, browser, and body all at once, I treat the web as a whole as a concrete poem, revealing our infrastructural intimacies while treating my body as an interface. Perhaps it's not only a program that is performing itself; we can also intervene, reclaim the work, and breathe it new life. Consuming work in new ways is just as interesting as creating it.
Also see:
Interview on BOMB: Chia Amisola by Meg Miller
Presentation: Becoming Hypertext Performance-lecture
Teaching: Becoming Hypertext at SFPC
