However, the project has truly influenced the whole concept of audience. Christmas Box was the first performance we had undertaken whereby the audience were not present physically in the space. This demanded a re-evaluation of our place as bodies within a performance arena, and how the technology we were exploiting altered our relationship with an audience. What was live, what was pre-recorded, what was improvised, what was planned. The usual performance dynamic blasted apart. This fracture has lead to a series of experiments where by I have established situations where there is a performance dynamic but the actual act is private. (1)

Christmas Box - 24 on 25 was a phenomenal event for doo-cot, performing live from Midnight Christmas Eve – right through until Midnight Christmas Day 2001. This broadcast initiated the streaming possibilities of our virtual venue the ‘Miniature Theatre into Hyperspace’. I had planned its development for over 3 years.

The flattened out characters and layered scenery of the paper theatre has been my inspiration for web design. A small stage in faux 3D - parallax for a giant. As a child I loved my sister’s ‘tuppence coloured, penny plain’ Pollack’s miniature theatre. It had its own lights on batteries and we augmented the preprinted characters with our own drawings and figures cut out of Ladybird books. It made a guest appearance during Christmas Box - 24 and is box 21 on the doo-cot index page http://www.doo-cot.com.

Tying the streamed event into a major national holiday was a good concept and one which allowed experimentation with very accessible and immediate iconography of popular culture; an intervention into Christmas Day; an interuption of festivities and the tradition 'family' holiday.

As stated in the report:

	On Christmas Day for the actual stream Nenagh Watson and myself were the only ones performing and operating Christmas Box. We had technical support (Julie Parker) until last thing on the 23rd of December and then we were on our own. For our very own bizarre Christmas broadcast. To emphasis the live nature of the work we borrowed a television – enabling me to film the tv and mix this with images we were creating. For example, Nenagh dressed as an angel during Songs of Praise and I myself was the Queen at 3pm during her speech. Working with live media events was another interesting development and one to exploit again. We referenced traditional Christmas specials like ‘The Sound Of Music’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’. So the project spanned from the secular to the spiritual and incorporated real events such as the bush fires in Australia, opening our presents, cooking, and eating Christmas lunch, the mundane and the monumental. I was able to record the whole 24 hours onto SVHS tape and will compile the highlights to archive on the web. Christmas Box was a hybrid of reality tv, pantomime and cyber celebration. (1)

Touring to different theatres you have some degree of control of how your work is presented and how individual members of the audience will be able to perceive the work. Seats in the centre front are best – you can advise but the audience will sit at the back and at the sides because that is where they "always sit"! This is analogous with the individual at the browser – is their home computer outmoded or up to date? You have to strive to make it the best for as many people as possible.

	The spectator becomes a participant, joins the author in the production: a collaborator. (2)

This is significantly truer with web work than with any other form. Therefore it is important to have a range of collaborators to test your beta site and talk you through their experience of downloading - a player or a plugin. So you can mend your smashed links, amend your html and rewrite your page to advise in the clearest possible way for a further audience. Knowing you will always lose someone along the way.

New technologies are challenging the traditional notion of Theatre - I could say that to knowingly engage an outside gaze is in itself inherently theatrical. That although the audience may not be physically present – the consideration of their presence is presence itself.

Audience feedback from Christmas Box stated how for some they wanted to gate crash and be an active part of the event. Knowing it was live made them feel plugged in which made them want to actively interact. With cyberspace the physicality of space is altered, one’s senses are presence within it whilst the body is not. We are at the beginning of experimentation with internet performance and a new theatricality is emerging.

Performance online offers similar liberations to theatre that film takes for granted.

	Whereas film is used to show reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies. (3)

Can remote performance be closer than being at a live performance? A quote from A R Stone’s interviews with sex workers:

At least one of my informants reports that he feels more "embodied'' on the MOO than when talking on the phone, despite the lack of even the vocal channel. This sense of embodiment is an entirely constructed feeling, coming largely from the conscious use of physical "actions'' during conversations, like feedback signals that might be used in face-to-face conversation. (4)

Christmas Box was at times like a séance. It was a performance not knowing whether there was an audience at any one time – but we where conjuring them up through the ethernet. It is easy to see why the internet has been linked to Vodou by among others William Gibson (5). Please see note (6) for the explanation for the spelling of Vodou and not Voodoo.

Possession, an important dimension of Vodou worship, is among the least understood aspects of the religion. Through possession, both the Iwa and the community are affirmed. The people transcend their materiality by becoming spirits, and the spirits renew their vigor by dancing and feasting with the chwal, or horses, for it is said that during possession the Iwa rides a person like a cavalier rides a horse…for during possession a person experiences a displacement of gwo bon anj, or "big consciousness", which is taken over by the Iwa. (6)

Well as Vodou is a word for ancestral spirit and drums – the ghosts and CDs of Christmas present were our alternative. For me as a performer it was a release to be able to PLAY (7) and the experience worked best when the two of us could be in a semi state of consciousness. But I find the relating from one world of the machine, to the mind of relating to a performer, interesting and sometimes difficult. Schisms form when you are alive to both worlds, and you are brought back and forth between, machine immersion and human contact.

	Dark play may be conscious playing, but it can also be playing in the dark when some or even all of the players don't know they are playing. Dark play occurs when contradictory realities coexist, each seemingly capable of cancelling the other out, as in the double cross, or as in the Indian tale of "the Brahmin who dreamed he was an untouchable who dreamed he was a king" but who could not determine who was the dreamer and who the dreamt because each of his realities tested out as true...(8)

This performing to camera – a web camera – a dv camera – a security camera – several cameras all going into one visionmixer, is like live film making. The out-takes are included with the highlights and all between. With the technology being so sketchy the miracle is that it happens at all. Why not just make a film and have the problems of distribution in another form? Technology may let us down but at least it offers us some hope of self publishing - 'everyone' can publish what they like on the internet - but getting a film nationally or internationally distributed is about HARD wired connections. Circumvent the hierarchical system - grow your own 'radical horizontality'. (9) A little bit of Zingiber officinale rhizome. (10)

I enjoy the internet’s randomness or random access memory (RAM) – do we have connection? Can we PLAY? Or is that it for today? The connection severed just like the decapitated head.

	Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (11)

Obviously contemporary discourse in cyber theory can illuminate many questions and give a shadow of an answer - to quickly disappear into yet another question...