dated/1997

David Jennings Associates	Site Gallery	Designers Republic	National Centre for Popular Music	David Palmer
Flow Simulation	ACT	Lifesize pictures	dated. video. programme	dated. text. programme

[Clip length: 1 min 6 secs]
The video may take some time to start playing. You can explore the links on this page to Forced Entertainment web sites during the download without interrupting it.

Tim Etchells
Forced Entertainment

In 1984, Forced Entertainment made Sheffield their base for producing new and often challenging theatre pieces. A preoccupation with non-linear narrative and different ways of addressing an audience has led naturally to explorations of the potential of interactive media.

Forced Entertainment have been on-line for many years, using the Net first as a means of communicating with other groups and individuals in their field. They developed the first version of their Web site in 1996. This included an archive of texts and images from their work - though in Spring 1997 their video material had yet to be integrated into the site.

With an increasing number of international tours in recent years, email and the web provide a practical and cheap way for Forced Entertainment to communicate with venues and promoters.

But in 1997 the company were increasingly looking to use new media like the Internet for other kinds of work. At the time of this video clip, they were developing a Quicktime Virtual Reality piece with photographer Hugo Glendinning (a long time collaborator). And in the clip, director and writer Tim Etchells describes plans for another on-line interactive piece called "Digital Cities".