What is telepresence?
Telepresence is real-time performance or connections using the internet to link two or more remote spaces, allowing participants to collaboratively play, interact, and communicate at a distance. It is like video conferencing but using the full body.
Telepresence is a key area for young people living and working in the 21st century connecting daily through the use of online chat, skype, video conferencing and other virtual interfaces. People can now transmit, receive and respond through gesture communication, and they can play, dance and chat with friends and colleagues who are thousands of miles away, using these full body/voice interfaces.
Telepresence is now utilised to enhance and extend future work, health and play environments – it has come into mass usage through the requirements to communicate across time and space durting the global pandemic in 2020-22. Full body telepresence allows the physical live body to be engaged simultaneously with another body at a distance. We can now create immersive local to local connectivity spaces 24/7, a huge advancement on our first experiments in the early 90s where we were restricted by technological equipment, latency and real-time data flows.
body>data>space expertise
The international research and development of performance telematics/telepresence work that body>data>space have completed over the past 30 years has included 2-3 way transmissions between UK, Germany, Finland, Portugal, Austria, Slovenia, Japan, China and US in various combinations from clubs, theatres, schools and universities, arts centres, festivals and conference centres.
body>data>space has built up extensive experience of live linked performances in spaces which can be miles apart, connecting cultures and people across the world. Its potentials for extending real-time understanding and knowledge transfer are huge and, as broadband speeds increase, so do the uses for telematics in everyday use.
Our Creative Director, Ghislaine Boddington is an artist researcher, dramturg, curator and thought leader specialising in body responsive technologies, recognised as an international pioneer in full body telepresence since the 90’s. Ghislaine Boddington was awarded the IX Immersion Experience Visionary Pioneer Award by SAT Montreal in 2017 for her long term expert work into digital embodiment.
Our offer
body>data>space works on the development of immersive experiences bringing together the convergence of telepresence, virtual worlds and motion capture, placing the body at the centre of the digital interaction.
Best recent example is the development of ‘me and my shadow‘ by body>data>space associate artist Jo Hyde with Phill Tew and Ghislaine Boddington. A deeply immersive experience consisting of separate portals me and my shadow is an international telepresence experience that connects participants through a shared online environment. Participants are represented as live digital shadows and can communicate with each other in the real-time digital environment. ‘me and my shadow’ premiered at the National Theatre in June 2012.
We can also create fun, visually immersive environments revolutionising people connectivity and knowledge exchange, extending understanding of the use of the body in virtual space. Telepresence, tele-intuition by linking people, in all different kinds of time spaces and through time zones is exciting! Through a tried and tested series of enjoyable, dynamic exercises and workshop techniques we can take any group, young to old, into a physical orientation environment to learn to navigate their way through the telematic space.
We can also we can deliver bespoke workshops lasting a few hours to half a day, or more extensive telematic workshop experiences.
