mia makela

Summarize Mia Makela's five essential elements of Live Cinema, and relate these elements to the Live Cinema Explosion during Avant-Garde Night at the Lumina Theater.

1. Space - The physical area that the event takes place in, the area of performance, and the area which the projection takes place upon.
2. Time - the duration of the "event", i.e. real time.
3. Performance - The actual visuals and sounds of the event.
4. Public - The audience and their participation.
5. Projection - the area and means of projecting images upon a screen, wall, etc.

During the Live Cinema Explosion, we ran into all these elements. Our space was the Lumina, a pretty big area with plenty of spots for projection. The time of the Explosion was about 15-20 minutes, I'd say. The Performance was the use of VJ software mixed with a live DJ and also several projections of loops onto surrounding walls. The Public element was the audience began mostly sitting, with noisemakers distributed beforehand for them to participate in the Explosion. By the end of it, several audience members, came down and joined the Explosion, either on the keyboard or the VJ software. The Projection was a theatre-sized screen along with the walls.

What are the challenges facing "laptop performers" in relation to audience expectations about "liveness" and performance? How are some artists addressing these challenges?

Laptop performers face the challenges are the fact that a lot of the loops and visuals are prerecorded and only mixed live. The audience usually expects liveness, like at a music concert where instruments are played live with no prerecordedness (unless its a rap concert but that's not music anyway). With VJing, an audience doesn't really know what is live and what is not, they could be watching a DVD for all they know. Some VJs have overcome this problem by using dual projectors to display the desktop view and the results of the mixing like "Slub" has done. Others have steered away from using only laptops, like AVCENTRALEN who mix colors and water with a live camera recording it all and projecting it.


Well, that was fun. Maybe I can focus on this analysis thing now.