LOL: THE DESKTOP THEATER ARCHIVES
By:  Adriene Jenik & Lisa Brenneis

Desktop Theater, the brainchild of Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, is an umbrella title for a diverse array of guerrilla theater events using the Internet's graphical chat rooms such as the Palace. By taking place within virtual arenas where everyone is already masked and performing a version of themselves as "avatars", Desktop Theater attempts to break down the barriers between audience and actor. Here theater is stripped down to its simplest possible components: the word, the face, the bounded space. Desktop Theater performances take place "doubly live," both as activities within the Palace and as projected and amplified events at festivals and conferences. Jenik and Brenneis presented the first Desktop Theater experiment, "waitingforgodot.com," at the Third Annual Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, in the fall of 1997.
 
A special live performance by Jenik and Brenneis, "A bag full of Cats: Desktop Theater interfaces with the parallel universe," took place at the Beall Center at 8 pm on Tuesday, Oct. 17, as part of the exhibition's  opening celebrations.

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