General Overview

A streaming, telekinetic performance event is proposed as the closing phase of the project. Through collaborative inter-media creation process, developed simultaneously by four teams of artists in co-organizing institutions (media artists, directors and choreographers, programmers and software developers, as well as performers of various mediums), a fully developed dramaturgical structure will be created in order to thoughtfully integrate elements of interactive media and new technologies with live performance practices.

An average woman stumbles on a new video game, See You in Walhalla. She creates her avatar. The game’s purpose is to guide and navigate this avatar, born as an empty shell, through various experiences and journey’s taking place in an imaginary city landscape created out of Amsterdam, Athens and Sofia, with the final goal of making this empty shell into “a civilized human being”. The problem is that while getting more involved with the game, our very average woman begins to relate to the game so much that she finds it hard to separate reality from the game.

Three performers, one in each city represent the avatar of the game, the player/owner and the confused state of the player who is facing a slight affliction of confusing the game with her reality.

Three performers inter-connected, a complex web of fantastical events seen from pre-recorded video, live-web cam and audio streams from Amsterdam and Sofia, interactively controlled sound and video based on the movements of a performer in Athens, site-specific performances in Sofia and Amsterdam – these components will compose the tale of See You in Walhalla.

This is a tale of a wonderer within an imaginary trans-geographical labyrinth.   This wonderer is putting together a broken puzzle of his multilayered journeys in which he reassess and questions his own, as well existing social and cultural stereotypes, political structures, "acceptable" human behaviors, bodily languages, ideals, beliefs, and other attributes up-keeping "our" Western status quo.

This wonderer will be our tool to explore some commonalities and differences in human interactions that exist in a common Western metropolis, in particular Sofia, Athens, and Amsterdam.   She boroughs some characteristics from literary character of the flâneur, " an anonymous face in the multitude, who is free to probe her surroundings for clues and hints that may go unnoticed by the others" .  

However our wonderer is not someone who merely abandons herself in the crowd, but actively participates, observes, revolts, instigates in and within his surroundings. "She enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as she sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes". Her journey takes on an almost dream-like quality where one is never quite sure if the setting exists simply to function as a backdrop for the events that take place or are real in fact.   "He is a shopper with no intention to buy. "

Concept

Contextually, there is a parallel that could be drawn between an identity of this wonderer and a virtual, video game character.   Literally speaking an ability to be many people and in many places at the same time, go unnoticed - anonymity, certain emotional detachment/degraded consequences, fantastical ability to manipulate and transform your immediate environment, loneliness and non-permanence, a sense of not belonging, learning as you go, and other such qualities contribute to this possible similarity.   That is not to say that the script will include video game like elements.

The performance will investigate the social geography of a contemporary urban life through the wanderings of one character in a multi-dimensional, trans-geographic urban-landscape. This urban-labyrinth will reference a complex video game environment and will represent the consciousness of the player himself. The game will be built from this person's subjective perception of reality, interpreted through her own desires, fears and misconceptions. It is an inner exploration that investigates the ultimate dream of our time, "to gradually loose our sense of perspective, gravity and time, the foundation of our perceptions".   Through this fiction character we would like to explore the confusion of a contemporary person that is looking for alternative ways of communication through the virtual world and reach to the point of juggling between reality and virtuality.

"A whole world and a number of human lives are reborn via Internet's downloadable images, but then again, perhaps it is only the last flickering seconds, outside time and space, of a human life."

This is a story of AviAva.   AviAva is the heroin of our tale.   She is your average avatar created by a very average person.   One Tuesday morning, after a period of roughly two months of being ignored by her creator, AviAva is woken up by the system administrator of the digital world she lives in, Second Life.   "ACCOUNT EXPIRED - please log on to renew your privileges!   You have one day to perform this task, otherwise your account will be terminated!"

AviAva, is slightly disturbed by the fact that in one day her existence will be annihilated.   She does not like the fact that her owner has abandoned and forgotten her.   And so on being an impulsive gal, she decides to correct this injustice.   She collects her inventory bag, makes the final adjustments to her appearance and sets along to find her maker.

AviAva walks out into the sunny Tuesday day, walking along the streets of a somewhat familiar city.   Things around her seem familiar yet somewhat strange.   The only way she can guide herself is by following the system her owner has followed: a kind of instructional guide to explore an unknown place, very much like your average City Guide of Paris, lets say. The problem is that in real life things don't quite work out the same way they function in the familiar synthetic environment of Second Life.   And so by trial and error, AviAva tries to deal and overcome the things that happen to her on this sunny Tuesday day, on her quest to find her creator.

Our three performers will assume the role of AviAva, being able to be in many places at the same time.   Strange huh?   Well, in the end we find out that the tale we are being told, is actually a game scenario that is being played by the unknown stranger, or perhaps our audience.