Panel Statement

Panel: Paradiso Artificiale Rehearsals for Death: Avators and the Post-Biological Experience

The questions which face us all in regard to our own death, and the experience which occurs and follows, are the fundamental questions for an art form whose ‘places’ are the dream-like narrative stages for a ‘Virtual Theatre.’ These non-corporeal spaces provide rehearsals for the experiences which may be difficult or impossible to represent in any other way due to the overwhelming intrusions of our physical presences. It is common for us to represent aspects of our experience in ‘characters’ and ‘identities’ which are familiar to us all but are fragmented in the chess game of a narrative of conflicting and cooperating motivations and reasons. However, in what sense does a character in the Virtual Theatre have a ‘body’, and in what sense a `viewpoint’ and a ‘presence’? And within the experience of non-deterministic and repeatable narrative, what is the sense of the ‘tragedy’ of fate, the certainty of ‘objective’ experience, the agony of one-time choices, and the finality of a present moment? Could it be that these new aspects of narrative provide rehearsals for the experiences we are to have after we are dead? And can we reveal a beauty so sublime and satisfying that we will be happy to ‘be’ its narrative existence ‘forever’, or without time?

• Mark Rudolph (Canada), VRML and Java Artist, Montreal Quebec.