It’s the day before the 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance kicks off! A whole week of performances – revisiting 14 wonderful shows from the last 5 years of UpStage festivals in “Walking Backwards into the Future“, and introducing a much broader programme than ever before through the addition of other online platforms besides UpStage, in “Testing 1 2, 1 2, 1 2“.

As the artists are busy making their final preparations, festival architects Vicki Smith and Helen Varley Jamieson are also working hard to ensure that our audiences know about the festival and that the technical side of things work well. Vicki is responding to an interview for NZ arts web site The Big Idea and getting the latest media release out to the world; while Helen has been working with Martin Eisnebarth and dedicated festival techs Scott Riddell and Gavin Chan to make some last minute fixes on the UpStage server. A complicated problem – or rather, a series of intertangled problems – that has plagued the UpStage server since an operating system upgrade at the start of the year and caused some of the avatar voices to break, has finally been fixed, to much excitement and after a concerted intense effort by Martin, Scott and Gavin, with additional help from Heath Behrens, Daniel Han and Paul Rohrlach.

Having shows in platforms other than UpStage has also led to some interesting technical challenges. Three shows in Second Life will be streamed out to a browser, so that audiences can watch without having to download and install the Second Life software. But this is not as straightforward as it might sound – streamers Marischka Klinkhamer, Lynne Heller and Christine Liao have had to find solutions for audio echoes and illegible text.

But it’s all coming together nicely, thanks to the dedication of the globally dispersed, digitally connected team. And tomorrow at 8pm NZ time, 8am CET (find your local time here) everything kicks off in the 121212 festival foyer. We hope you will join us then or at some other time during the festival!