Mutual Assured Deconstruction

Michael Arnold Mages
marnoldm@du.edu

Summary

Although there are those who deride characterizations of the developments surrounding the rise of the Internet as a complex, multichannel communications medium as naïve and utopian, it is indisputable that the advent of the networked society has provided a formerly mute audience with agency to “feed back” into the system of content dissemination. Althougth changes in communications media are frequently reflected or augured in the Arts, this development has gone largely unnoticed in the realm of Western music. Even in rock or jazz concerts, the audience remains a tertiary adjunct to the nature or quality of the performance.

Mutual Assured Deconstruction is a democratized, musical-interactive space that a participant can inhabit both proximally and through the agency of a software-based representation over an Internet Protocol-type network in real time. The primary goals of MAD are to conduct inquiry into the nature and quality of Computer-mediated interaction and telepresence, and to examine the transformative effect that new media has on the set of relationships engendered by a performance situation (primarily the audience-performer-artist triumvirate) and established concepts of space, experience and the body.

Launch excerpt from archived MAD performance
(Victoria Myhren Gallery, Denver, Colorado USA from November 9th to November 14th, 2001)