Philadelphia Experimental Theater Company Unveils Online Theatre Project FRAME

Philadelphia's theater research company - New Paradise Laboratories - announces today the launch of FRAME, its online performance-based platform. NPL is celebrating the event with a party tonight at 7:00 pm at its space in The Maas Building, a multi-use arts facility in Northern Liberties. This website (www.newparadiselaboratories.org) is NPL's organizational online home. It has reached over 21,000 unique visitors for 31,000 views worldwide in its year of beta-testing. Funded in part by PEW Charitable Trusts, the project allows NPL to exercise its creative mission online.

The site mingles original NPL-created performance material with found material from a wide variety of sources into a media-rich mash-up. "It's the mash-up part that is the real performance", says NPL Artistic Director Whit MacLaughlin. "The world is a collage these days when you look at it from a web point of view. Mixing and remixing has become a primary art form as the world adjusts to this new way of seeing itself – this idea slammed up against that one. FRAME is a way for digital natives to understand the nature of theatre as it collides with a wide variety of Internet performance practices."

The company has delved into online theatrical work before, through critically acclaimed projects FATEBOOK (www.fatebooktheshow.com) and Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (www.extremelypublicdisplays.com), bringing NPL a reputation as a leader in theater for a generation of digital natives.

FRAME, is the beginning of a sort of fiction-based social network. Audiences are invited to create alter egos as a character-based approach to online interaction. FRAME then provides space for audiences to post alongside its curators as artists-in-response. It employs a host of Specialists who function as a rotating corps of curator-performers, currently generating pilot FRAME performance. Thus far, for instance, NPL has auditioned a new company in FRAME. 100 performers made 100 original video pieces as a way of introducing themselves to the company and to each other. These were all posted in FRAME. FRAME will figure prominently as the company prepares its next piece – 27 – which will premiere in the 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.

"Almost all of the posts in FRAME have to do with performance – styles of self-presentation that greatly expand the vocabulary of theatre as it is conventionally practiced today. FRAME is our place to join into the conversation as a company that makes its own 'outside the darkened room' performance. FRAME is a space of research and contemplation," says MacLaughlin.

NPL seeks to extend realspace/cyberspace performance concepts into local, national, and international arenas. FRAME reaches audiences not only in the Philadelphia region, but also connect thinkers, opinion makers, and viewers around the world. A recent article about NPL's work on Mashable raised the website's profile, as has a nomination for a Humanizing Technology Award from BigThink, a technology and cultural knowledge forum run by search engine BING.

FRAME embodies NPL values of responsiveness and agility in its artistic practice. Through FRAME, users gain access to thousands of arresting images, songs, concepts, essays, and ideas highlighted by the power of the Internet in an environment shaped by critical thinking and filtered through the heart of NPL's mission.

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