DAC SPARKS Future of Reality Artist Talks - Paul Sermon, Coombe Hill or High Water

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.