UpStage: A Platform for Creating and Performing Online

Avatar Body Collision is a globally dispersed group that creates and performs online (you can visit our site at http://www.avatarbodycollision. org). The four members - Vicki Smith, Karla Ptacek, Leena Saarinen, and myself (Helen Varley Jamieson) - live in New Zealand, the UK, Finland, and Australia, respectively. We have never met physically as a group. Our collaboration began in 2001, and since then we've created and performed eight shows for either online or on- site audiences. Recently, we devised work for both audiences simultaneously. Initially we used two different chat applications, often in combination: The Palace and iVisit. The Palace is a graphical chat environment that allows the manipulation of two-dimensional avatars (characters) with text2speech audio, and iVisit is an audiovisual conferencing application that utilizes webcams and live audio. We chose these applications because they were free, cross-platform (Mac and PC) and offered interesting features for live performance.