North-South-East-West 5.0 - the Fire Ceremony
Telematic Performance Project, 2005
Presented in Taiwan at the Chung Yuan University

Pat Badani and Graham Thompson

 

Project Description
"North-South-East-West 5.0"
(2005) I collaborated in a telematic performance initiated by Graham Thompson who, inspired by Aboriginal fire ceremonies, seeks to express the wisdom of the north (Canada). Conducted entirely on the Internet using Instant Messenger and captured from the desktop, version 5.0 was a collaborative project involving artists from Ottawa (Graham Thompson), Vancouver (Jeremy Turner), Chicago (Pat Badani) and Tokyo (Fumiaki Murakami) who created ritualistic online fire ceremonies.

The project is informed by the practice of pioneer video artist Nam June Paik, who worked with media, arts and shamanism, thereby expressing and concreting the relationship between the two. As an influential founding member of the Fluxus movement, he aspired to planetary harmony and union (the original meaning of the term 'Fluxus' is 'fluidity', which can be linked to the displacement of nomads, both physical and virtual).

Artists have succeeded in filling the role of the shaman through their world-making and sense-making. We can say that the universe invoked and meditated by the shamans, and the universe created by the artists, are all predecessors of the cyberspace facilitated by computers. If we find common elements between the different genres of art, shamanism and cyberspace, it is because of the immateriality of the movements and the mediation of different states. In this light, the spiritual displacements and movements of shamanism are seen to be similar to the fluid displacement occuring in cyberspace.

The Ceremony
Since there was no prescribed set of instructions, artists in Ottawa, Vancouver, Tokyo and Chicago were given the freedom to invent their own actions within the window of the videoconference. To overcome the purposelessness of movement, participants found a way of mirroring each other in ceremonial gestures.

As the interactions evolved, in all cases we found that the sense of space and time collapsed as we developed our non-verbal communications through light, warmth and motion. As peaceful as traditional fire ceremonies, the online version proved the power of the flame to enrich the human spirit. Even though the fire's presence was shared through the window of a messaging application across continents and oceans, it still functioned in the development of a ceremonial ritual through an electronic netwrok.



e-mail: pbadani@ilstu.edu

all images © Pat Badani 1990-2006