All the World’s a Screen follows a series of renowned telematic art installations I have produced since the early 1990’s, where the underlying issues concerning telepresence and shared intimate experience between geographically remote participants are further explored in the context of user generated narratives and scenography as an open-system of interaction between audiences in Manchester and Barcelona.
This installation pushes the boundaries of telematic art and generative cinema by combining the possibilities of telepresent performance with miniature scale-models and animated scenes. Through audience participation I explored the way impromptu narratives can be revealed and directed through the interplay between artist, audience and environment. This project referenced Shakespeare’s infamous line ‘All the world’s a stage’, representing his ‘seven stages of man’ as seven rooms in a model film set, providing a metaphysical backdrop to steer the unfolding telematic plot.
Firmly rooted in the discourse on interactive arts All the World’s a Screen was developed as a practice-based research project to confront new and emergent issues concerning ludic interfaces and open-digital systems. In their paper ‘Missing in action agency and meaning’ (2011) Edward Shanken and Kristine Stiles argue that interactivity per se does not automatically produce works that offer a dynamic role or ‘agency’ and in response All the World’s a Screen looks to role-play as a way of enhancing interaction between communities by offering opportunities for people to experience their environment in different ways; encountering strangers, allowing participants of all ages to play, create meaning and explore communication to cross boundaries of culture and language.
All the Word’s a Screen was developed in collaboration with artist Charlotte Gould, contributing 3D animated environments and set designs, during our artist-in-residence at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) Study Centre from March to May 2011, and was presented between MadLab Manchester and HANGAR Barcelona on 28th May 2011, and between the MACBA Study Centre and the Umbro Design Space Manchester for the FutureEverything Festival on 13th May 2011. These outcomes have since been presented at ISEA Sydney in June 2013 and as a journal article in The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Intellect) in Sept 2013.
Project Web Site: http://www.paulsermon.org/screen
Project Blog: http://alltheworldsascreen.tumblr.com
