Coombe Hill or High Water (2022/23) is an interactive tragicomedy for two online performers set in a dystopian redundant world; an online post-Brexit/COVID-19/democracy end-of-days story/game/drama/meeting. It presents two online telepresent participants (actors) trying to carry on as normal, waking up in flood water, distilling their own fuel and driving into the hills to escape with no real plan, only to find themselves back where they started, but worse. The work is a dark absurd satire on ecological ignorance told through a symbiosis of storytelling and telepresence. The work is informed by the recently completed AHRC-funded COVID-19 Response project Collaborative Solutions for the Performing Arts: A Telepresence Stage (December 2020 to May 2022) https://www.telepresencestage.org, supporting theatre and dance companies with new online telepresence performance solutions through the COVID-19 lockdown. This new work builds on online telepresence techniques such as green-screen compositing, networked video production and virtual set design to provide coexistent telepresent interactions between remote performers. By using background segmentation instead of green-screen technology Coombe Hill or High Water has been developed as a networked telepresence artwork for online public participation, requiring only a computer, webcam, Internet connection, and web browser to participate.

This project will be live on the artist’s website during the SIGGRAPH conference!

• Monday, July 29, 12:30-16:30 PM
• Tuesday, July 30, 12:30-16:30 PM
• Wednesday, July 31, 12:00-17:00 PM
• Thursday, August 1, 12:30-14:30 PM

‘Coombe Hill or High Water (2023)’ presents a phenomenological telepresence encounter with the ‘self’ as ‘other’ between remote locations; across cities, countries and continents, bringing distant participants together in a third-space of mutual coexistence. It assimilates a sense of intimacy and closeness through telepresent affection, touch and empathy, played out in environmental, social, political, and domestic contexts, accessed purely via a laptop computer and webcam. This phenomenological telepresence encounter is at the core of this work. The user experience of this third-space as ‘place’ occurs through the laptop screen in front of them, showing the live video feed of the remote participants composited and superimposed together. They rely on the screens to navigate and control their interactions, but more importantly, they shift their experience into the reflected third-space. The screen isn’t watched, it is entered like a portal to a coexistent social place, and in doing so they can leave their physical vulnerabilities behind, along with selfconscious inhibitions to engage in the specular image through the observation of the self as other. The self-view laptop screen enhances the spatial sense of presence, providing a means of both observation and displacement of the self. The participants not only share the reflection of the ‘self’ but also the ‘gaze’ upon the other from the same remote camera location. They are e!ectively sharing the same ‘eyes’ – the same point of view, where one’s gaze on the other and view of the self are conflated. The objectification of the gaze is confronted on equal empathetic terms through this process of sharing our presence in a third-space place from a single viewpoint. Literally, seeing something from someone else’s point of view.