Early Internet Collaborations: The Cassandra Project

A very early experiment for Internet collaboration began with a December 15th, 1996 exchange among dancers at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, musicians at a loft in Greenwich Village, NYC, and actors at a studio stage at New York University known as the Cassandra Project. A few remnants of the posted event still linger on servers somewhere. The link posted here may work for a while, but like all web events, websites become ephemeral phatoms that come and go and the preservation of the history of the Internet and its artifacts has been very haphanzard to say the least.

Some of the key artists were choreographer/dancer Lisa Naugle at SFU, Director Alistair Martin-Smith with actors from NYU's Educational Theatre, and musicians and composers at the loft of webartist Pierre de Karangal, led by composers Dinu Ghezzo and John Gilbert. Chianan Yen engineered the cound at the loft site and later produced a CD of the sound events.

The flavor of the times gave a special pioneering feeling to these early beginnings. Artists were experimenting on many levels. The atmosphere was that of a frontier, and engineers and artists found a new framework to explore and extend their work.

The format of this 1996 event was very simple: Using the theme of Cassandra, each group of artists posted short improvisations on the WWW. Each site viewed and listened to the work of each other and created responses which were in turn posted. A structured improvisation by the three sites later led to an exchange of video and sound-ytacks which were used in a stage production in May, 1997.

From these simple beginnings works of depth and richness have evolved, and I2 has begun to come into its own as an artistic medium. There are artists seriously at work in incorporating media and distance collaboration as the substance of their creative performances.

However, recently exploring the I2 site, I have been struck by the apparent lack of innovation. Mostly there seem to be experiments using the I2 pipeline as a distance education classroom, or a professional artist giving a lesson to a student at a distance, or the broadcast of a recital to a distant location. Telematic Dance has definitely merged technical and artistic innovations as I2 events. Unfortunately these events have not been seriously reviewed, and publication noting details of the events is often not forthcoming.

Yet there is something about the way I2 dissolves boundaries and exists in its own unqiue time space that suggests we have yet to discover the true artistic idiom of this new medium.