Through the electronic looking glass

eRena

Yngve Sundblad
Royal Institute of Technology
yngve@nada.kth.se

eRENA is coming to the end of its second year of exploring the creative potential of electronic arenas. Substantial achievements to date include:

• Out of this World, an experiment in "inhabited television" produced collaboratively by the University of Nottingham, British Telecom and Illuminations Television, which was staged in Manchester in late 1998;

• the Rain Curtain mixed reality installation, developed in Karlsruhe in early 1999 by the theatre group Blast Theory in cooperation with ZKM in Karlsruhe, the University of Nottingham and KTH;

• presentations at a number of European festivals of the eMUSE project, developed at GMD in Bonn, which brings together real and virtual spaces.

The work involved in developing and performing these projects has been studied and analysed ethnographically and technically, mainly by KTH. As far as ongoing projects are concerned, ZKM, together with other partners in the consortium, is currently working with the artist Ken Feingold on a complex participatory artwork, Séance Box No.1 . Collaboration also continues with the theatre group Blast Theory, on a performance installation. Both projects explore the potential of the boundaries between real and virtual worlds. Also in preparation, finally, is the next stage of the ìinhabited televisionî work, which will be realised in a virtual world created in collaboration with [.tv], a channel operated by the British broadcaster Sky . This ‘new world’ will go online in September 1999, and a programme of related events will be featured on [.tv] throughout November and December. eRena web site: www.nada.kth.se/erena/

Introducing the Alien team (from Out of this world).