The new black box has global reach La MaMa’s CultureHub uses tech to connect cultures
FESTIVAL PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
REFEST A CultureHub presentation November 29 through December 1 At 47 Great Jones St., 3rd Floor (btw. Bowery & Lafayette For tickets & schedule, visit culturehub.org
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, will be at REFEST to present work he’s been developing with the Seoul Institute.
BY TOM TENNEY
I
n 1961, Ellen Stewart revolutionized the New York performance scene when she opened Café La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street tenement. The African-American fashion designer-cum-impresario imagined the new space as an alternative to popular OffOff Broadway venues like Caffe Cino and the Gaslight — small spaces that were relics of, and still very much associated with, the Beat coffeehouse scene. Those early venues had been created with a particular ambience and with a specific audience in mind. Stewart’s innovation was to create a truly neutral performance venue to serve as a tabula rasa for emerging playwrights, allowing them to create new work on their own terms. La MaMa was truly a “black box” — a theatrical architecture that inspired future generations of underground performance, and spawned what might be called a microtheatre movement in the East Village and the Lower East Side that continues to this day. But the black box wasn’t the only experimental innovation happening in the 1960s New York art world. Early in that decade, ideas driving the convergence of art with cybernetic and computer technology, being con-
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ducted in Europe by Roy Ascott and others, reached the United States. In 1966, American composer and sound-art pioneer Max Neuhaus teamed up with NYC radio station WBAI to create “Public Supply” — an experiment in twoway aural public space in which listeners could contribute to a composition in real time by phoning in to the station and having their voices electronically transformed into components of a musical composition. The project is considered be one of the first successful artistic collaborations over an electronic network in real time. The very same year, renowned abstract expressionist Robert Rauchenberg met an engineer from Bell Telephone Lab named Billy Klüver. Together, they launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), with the aim of connecting artists and technologists to launch experimental explorations into the intersection of art and technology. Meanwhile, Ellen Stewart was connecting La MaMa with theatrical communities around the world, and building a global circuit of independent theatrical practitioners. Networking, collaboration and technology were all emerging into the cultural zeitgeist — blending, morphing and generating new art forms and schools of thought. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in 2009 La MaMa launched CultureHub — its own art and technology in-
cubator, in partnership with Korea’s Seoul Institute of the Arts. The collaboration is dedicated not only to blending technology with performance, but also to using tech as a tool to continue the theatre’s long tradition of connecting cultures around the world. The new laboratory’s stated mission is to provide “a shared space for artists to collaborate, share ideas and create interdisciplinary works of art that explore emerging mediums and technologies.” For the past four years, they have been doing just that. In addition to presenting art/tech hybrids in their wired black box studio on Great Jones Street, CultureHub is equally invested in youth media and educational initiatives, conducting workshops for students, teens and young artists. Virtualab, one of their flagship programs, is dedicated to connecting students and professional artists via distance learning. One of the core technologies utilized by CultureHub specifically for this purpose is something called telepresence, which might be thought of as a hyper-customized version of teleconferencing. As opposed to participants sitting around a table and projecting to a single screen, telepresence uses live video to build virtual environCULTUREHUB, continued on p.23
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