Download Title:​c-theatre: a successful case of light speed distrActive

Title:​ c-theatre: a successful case of light speed distrActive performances
Presenter's name​: Alex Barchiesi
Affiliation​: GARR
Five keywords​: distributed performance, networked performance, lightspeed theatre, c-theatre,
distrActive artwork,
Authors names (if different from the presenter): A.Barchiesi, B.Nati, G.Viola, C.Allocchio,
E.Angelucci, P.Bolletta, M.Paniccia, A.Salvati, F.Tanlongo, C.Volpe
Author's affiliations:​ GARR
Presenter’s biography: ​creative Physicist, studied Particle Physics in Rome La Sapienza University,
fellow in Fermi Institute Chicago. PhD in Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and La Sapienza University of
Rome.
Researcher at European Spatial Agency (ESA) and at Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics
(INFN). Researcher at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN ATLAS experiment).
Lecturer at La Sapienza Rome University. Associate professor of new media art and informatics at Art
Academy of Rome; founder of the bLuELab art project, initiator of SINLAB experimental laboratory in
Switzerland EPFL. His artistic work has been presented around Europe including in IRCAM centre
Pompidou Paris and Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome and received international awards.
At present senior cloud architect in GARR Italy.
Presentation description:
In the era of crowdsourcing and omnipresent networking the performing arts area of research, and in
particular the theatre, will suffer a huge transformation to stay up to date and make a proficient use of
the immense potentials of the new technologies.
The new paradigm introduced with ultra high speed networks growing both in commercial and research
frameworks will force a redesign of the performing space that will be something else from theatre as we
know it and will make William Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage" a feasible scenario also for
real-time performances.
Given this premise we investigated in a sinergy with a renowned experimental-theatre director, namely
G.B.Corsetti, the possibilities opened by the physical fragmentation of the stage space.
This experiment started in 2015 and drove GARR and Corsetti's team of actors and video makers to
embrace a new form of theatrical approach that resulted recently in a professional performance: "il Ratto
di Europa" staged at REF16 (Roma Europa Festival 2016).
The overall process of finding a technical solution to a "real life performative problem" brought the GARR
team to put together a so called distrActive (distributed and interActive) technology that allowed
Corsetti's team to couple their creative needs with the optical fibers infrastructure own by GARR through
an hack of a commercially available hardware and to create a geo-distributed performance.
The technology is an absolute innovation in the field of performing arts and the system has been
designed as much general purpose and usable as possible.
The architecture aimed to:
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usability: the use of a remote or local camera on the stage space is almost equivalent from the
director’s point of view
speed: the latency introduced by a remote actor has been kept to few ms (far beyond the
latency of a normal camera used in these setups and far beyond the human perception)
portability: given an optical fiber network connection in the ​proximity (50-80km) it's in principle
possible to remotely use up to 16 video channels and 64 analog audio channels (at the state of
the art) on a single fiber couple
Aiming to a broad diffusion in a field that is clearly not a high-budget one there has been a certain effort
also in terms of the ratio between costs and performances and the choice of the hardware (given the
optical fibers mesh and the possibility to configure optical paths on that so to connect different points of
the infrastructure) has been carefully chosen so to minimize the expenses.
This is an obvious extension and a different approach than the LOLA established project (also strongly
driven by GARR) which uses the so called IP level (or L3) of the ISO OSI stack and coupling and mixing
of the two technologies can be foreseen to extend the usability to places where a direct optical
connection would be not feasible.
The presentation aims to show the details of all the phases of the project and the finalized solution that
we wish to export towards the community.
We do not want to bring only an extremely successful use case to the attention of the TNC public, but to
address the question if a dematerialization of the stage space in the form of a "network of c-theatres" is
a feasible scenario, like the one we had with the distribution network for the electricity after Edison or the
distribution of computing which we witness nowadays with cloud-ification of computing and
delocalization of storage resources.
The pros and contras of using Layer 2 instead of Layer 3 deserve attention.
A mixed scenario (of L2 + L3) can work in synergy with LOLA
(ref:http://www.conservatorio.trieste.it/art/ricerca/progetto-lola-low-latency ) also needs to be carefully
evaluated.