Legendary actor Karen Black, creates the role of a cyborgic agent remotely controlled and inhabited by seven university researchers.

Secret Agents

Secret Agents was a collaborative, commissioned networked e-opera initiated by Shawn Brixey and Fabian Wagmister for Arizona State University's, Institute for Studies in the Arts, as part of the International Digital Secrets Conference, 2001. The project was concerned with the creation of a cyborgic virtual being, a single embodied "agent" who would attend the conference and reflect the consciousness and consensus of the larger University of California Digital Arts Research Network collaborative team which included Sheldon Brown, Sharon Daniel, Lynn Hershman, Robert Nidieffer, and Victoria Vesna.

Karen Black, the secret agent being fitted by Shawn Brixey with modified video-conferencing and cellular system for covert operations.

The project was a remotely inhabited and site specific net-based performance that used a distributed personae to investigate and play out notions of agents and agency, presence and absence, identity and identification. Using both telepresent and robotic applications, celebrated stage and screen actor Karen Black was the human interface for the conference, and tele-performed on behalf of the group reflecting the collective ideas and knowledge base of the seven collaborating UC research faculty members.

UC faculty project collaborators Shawn Brixey, Sharon Daniel, Fabian Wagmister, and Victoria Vesna speaking live from a remote location to Karen Black, the secret agent via a modified video-conferencing system.

The agent was both metaphoric and actual: a virtually embodiment of our collaborative input as well as a flesh and blood presence at the conference site who's internal processes and external actions were remotely controlled by the collaborative team over the Internet.

Using an array of custom wireless video and cellular technologies, seven UC faculty project collaborators carried on a three day "live" covert video-conference - inside the head of actress Karen Black - where she then acted at the conference as our collective, overt  "secret agent". Because of the real-time remote access of the conference by the collaborators, through the overt agent Karen Black, collaborators were able to engage with conference participants as though Karen Black was a close friend or colleague even though they has never met them, she was able to speak on-the-fly with deep knowledge and discourse in all the areas of digital art and emerging technology encompassed by our more "secret" agents - the UC collaborators - even though she had no background or knowledge of the field.

The UC collaborative group was geographically distributed across the west coast, yet simultaneously telepresent and re-mapped in real-time onboard the host agent Karen Black. The realtime connection with both project collaborators and the field operative Karen Black allowed for a single entity to form at the conference site among the distributed participants.

Covert video footage of actor Karen Black, the secret agent simultaneously interviewing a conference attendee, and covertly video-conferencing live with UC System project collaborators at the Digital Secrets Conference at Arizona State University.

The live video and audio streams were recorded and edited during the event to form the nucleus of an e-opera which was performed by Karen Black as the closing ceremony of the conference. The e-opera carefully disclosed to the conference attendees their unknown role in a much larger network of ongoing distributed collaborations being organized by UC faculty collaborators.