CONNECTED!
Anatomic in action
ANATOMIC: Related to the structure of an organism
From February 2003-2005, Waag Society organized a weekly open studio at the Theatrum Anatomicum, hence the name Anatomic, inviting a wide range of young technological artists to collaboratively perform with various technologies online.
Within the Anatomic sessions we facilitated an exchange of knowledge, culture and skills between artists and participating publics outside Western Europe and North America. Through discovery of scalable, communicative techniques utilizing distributed technologies, interactive broadband and multi-user collaborative environments, we were looking to build and enhance resources in a creative commons. Cultural diversity and difference stimulates the dynamic process of mediated communication and we hope to continue nourishing both online and offline intercommunity praxis by connecting on a world stage. Anatomic aims at growing the skills of the local participants through knowledge exchange and shared expertise in real-time, multi-user, multi-channel environments such as Waag Society’s KeyWorx platform. Informal workshops, tutorials, presentations, performance events and explorations of applications and technologies including telekinetic devices, public and haptic interfaces and digital performative environments (Max/MSP/Jitter, pd, Isadora, PHP, Director) are supported by the hi-bandwidth Gigaport backbone.The weekly labs were streamed to participating artists and organizations that upload their simultaneous activities. Emphasis was placed on learning the tools and language of interaction, distributed broadband media networks and performance practice that investigates these technologies. One challenge of the experiment lies in distributing this learning process to an extended community of participants and viewers.