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I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. My parents divorced when I was 7. I saw Star Wars 20 times when it opened. I hated suburbia. I started acting because I felt like being onstage transported me elsewhere. At first it wss Christmas Carol at the Charles Playhouse, and then Six Characters in Search of an Author at BU (with Julianne Moore as my mom!).
When I was 12 I started taking on the “kid” roles at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, starting with Waiting for Godot with Tony Shalhoub. In 1984 I auditioned for Robert Wilson who had come to restage the Cologne section of his epic production of the CIVIL warS. It was such a strange experience. Holding still, silent, turning slowly, like a robot in slow motion. Something clicked for me. It felt special, not familiar. It was structural, architectural, mechanical.
I went to college in New York so that I could go to BAM, and the Wooster Group, and Richard Foreman. Once a week and during the summers I worked as an archivist for Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman Foundation. He saved everything—including materials from his 7 day play Ka Mountain in Iran in 1972 to his breakthrough opera at the Met with Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach. My role was to make sure that everything was categorized and preserved.
After graduating from Columbia in 1992, I stayed on full-time at the Foundation. I came up with the idea of digitizing the archives in an interactive format. A donor gave us a grant to develop the Interactive Multimedia Archives Project (IMAP).
This was my first real introduction to technology. I got one of the first Mac Quadras and began creating a CD-Rom focused on a work that Wilson had staged in 1969 at BAM called The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. The application incorporated research photos, drawings, furniture design, rehearsal and performance video. It was the first of its kind to subject a performing artist to a multimedia documentation process.
In 1993 I brought the project to the Mediale Convention in Hamburg. I was invited by the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe to become an Artist in Residence and help develop a new multimedia publishing lab. In 1994, I sensed the emergence of the Internet as a commercial medium, and so I returned to New York to be a part of it.
In 1995, I started SiteSpecific. I was 25 years old. I had evolved my interest in theatre into a passion for the World Wide Web, a whole new type of performance. 2 replies
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