Allison Janney Participating in Experimental Multimedia Event

Report on the event from calbear at Television Without Pity:
"It was conceived of and written by Adriene Jenik, Aallison Janney''s (ooh, they're both AJ!) sister-in-law-to-be, who is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD. The streaming part was the film that was projected on a new "bleeding edge research" building on the campus. (There were also some live, interactive things going on in the courtyard, as I understand it.) Anyway, it was pretty interesting - Allison Janney played the UCSD Chancellor in 2030, at the end of the first year in which everyone on campus is living inside full-time. (There's a much better description about the whole storyline and characters on the website. I can't do it justice here so I won't try.) She was great, even though a lot of her scenes were supposed to be surveillance video, and thus involved a grainy picture with no sound. Also, bad hairdo (think Lilith from Cheers/Frasier) because it's the future! Richard Jenik was also in it, as the "Inside Man" - the university's representative from their corporate partner. He had this one really cute scene where he sings their jingle in the shower. (Minds out of the gutter, now...you couldn't see anything!) All their scenes together were the "surveillance video" thing, which was a bummer, but we all know that Allison Janney needs no words to act. At the end it was sort of implied that they might get together, though it's an open question as to weather it was real, or the result of a massive drug trial involving everyone in the university. Interestingly, Richard Jenik''s character was the one who pushed to have the drug trial expanded to everyone in the university, (they didn't have to consent - in 2030 your agreement to be a research subject is the price of your education) and it seemed to me he did it so that the Chancellor would trust him. Confused? Yeah, me too.

I've been trying to see if they would post the video stream, or at least some still pictures, but I haven't seen them anywhere. My guess is everyone involved in the project is exhausted and taking a few days off, so it might be worthwhile to check back to the Specflic website now and again."



From Newswise:
"A live, site-specific multimedia event – written and directed by telecommunications media artist Adriene Jenik – will premiere Oct. 28 at the University of California, San Diego.

Called SPECFLIC and described by Jenik as “speculative distributed cinema,” the project uses cutting-edge transmission and display technologies to examine the social costs and benefits of those same technologies. Version 1.0 will show from 9 p.m. to midnight in the courtyard and on the surfaces of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
***

Like speculative fiction, a sci-fi genre to which the project partially owes its name, SPECFLIC imagines and investigates a possible near future.

Set in 2030, SPECFLIC portrays a radically re-envisioned UCSD: The university has moved almost entirely indoors and is now housed in a giant networked high-tech lab-tower. Sponsored by BioNeuroNanoComm, education “Inside” is offered free of charge in exchange for student labor and participation as test subjects in scientific studies. Communications, even of the most intimate kind, take place through mediating gadgets and devices. Meanwhile, “Outside,” lurks a group of self-exiled characters who threaten the new-order status quo.

SPECFLIC will feature live and pre-taped performances streamed through mobile video platforms, monitoring and sensor networks, as well as an array of asynchronous media forms. These will be mixed and clustered by Jenik and projected onto a variety of surfaces – ranging from giant rear-projection and LED screens to Calit2’s main elevator tower and brushed-steel facade.

Allison Janney, Emmy Award-winning actress of the TV series “West Wing,” will play the role of the 2030 Chancellor. Other featured performers include Ricardo Dominguez, Richard Jenik, Lisa Brenneis and Nao Bustamante. Additional text is by science fiction writer and UCSD alum Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Mars Trilogy."