Ursula Endlicher: interACTicons

Online-Action-Library / Intro / Installation & Workshop / Performance

interACTicons is a participatory, philosophical and theatrical investigation into the depth of the Internet as well as of its surface - of our activities on the Social Web; it scrutinizes the language used on social networking sites, which predefines the actions users are constantly conducting. The piece asks the audience to rethink these terms and their actions, and assign new value to them while participating in a performative commentary of our online social habits.

The project started out in the fall of 2010 with the idea to create "performative Internet pictograms" of our online activites through a participatory, workshop based process, which opens up the Web and lets it float into physical space, and so to re-experience, re-think and re-set what we do online...

interACTicons premiered in 2011 and is an ongoing project, with an expandable archive. Twelve overused social media terms such as friend, like, and share - found in abundance on social networking sites - are awaiting new meaning. This is your chance to give it to them - by creating interACTicons: movie or image files re-defining and re-enacting the content of these empty terms.

Help give the world's 40 most popular social networking sites a new gestalt! Your submission will determine the outcome of their ongoing performance...

Browse the Online-Action-Library anytime! Submission is currently unavailable during maintenance of the piece (as of October 2020).

Performances / Exhibitions of interACTicons and interACTicons, live!:

9 years later:

A newly staged version of >>interACTicons, live! << online in Zoom at >>A night of performances<< October 22, 2020, during the exhibition >>Traces Of Life<< at Hive Art Community, Brooklyn.
>>View a short excerpt of the performance here.<<

interACTicons was produced for and premiered at >>transmediale.11 festival<< in Berlin, in February 2011. It consisted of three parts: the online archive, accessible online as well as within the walk-in installation that hosted daily workshops on location - and the live performance "interACTicons, live! which enacted the collected material by two dancers.

interACTicons, remixed, a video version of the project, was shown at Big Screen Plaza in New York City in August, 2011.

You could also experience and participate in the project at >>paraflows Festival for Digital Arts and Cultures<< in Vienna, Austria, from September 13 - October 20, 2012.