Helen Varley Jamieson

Helen Varley Jamieson
Helen Varley Jamieson performing in "make-shift", Brisbane, Australia, February 2012
Born	1966 Dunedin, New Zealand
Nationality	New Zealand
Education	Bachelor of Arts (English Literature and Theatre), University of Otago, 1992; Master of Arts (Research), Queensland University of Technology, 2008
Known for	cyberformance, new media art, net art, digital art, theatre, writing

Helen Varley Jamieson is a digital media artist, playwright, performer, director and producer from New Zealand. She "is engaged in an ongoing exploration of the collision between theatre and the internet." Since 1997 she has been working on the internet professionally. In the year 2000 Helen Varley Jamieson coined the term cyberformance. This term is a combination of two words, cyberspace and performance. Jamieson states that "cyberformance can be located as a distinct form within the subsets of networked performance and digital performance, and within the overall form of theatre, as it is a live performance form with an audience that is complicit in the completion of the work in real time."

Cyberformances are "live theatrical performances in which remote participants are able to work together in real time through the medium of the internet." In her Master Thesis, Jamieson states that "cyberformance, like all forms of theatre and artistic expression, offers a means to approach and respond to the changing world we exist in."

In 2008 Helen Varley Jamieson completed her MA (research) degree in Cyberformance from Queensland University of Technology entitled "Adventures in Cyberformance: experiments at the interface of theatre and the internet."

Helen Varley Jamieson is one of the founders of the online performance platform UpStage, along with the other members of Avatar Body Collision (see below). UpStage is an open source browser-based application that provides a real-time collaborative platform for remote artists and audiences. It hosts online festivals of cyberformances as well as workshops and presentations.

Jamieson is a founding member of Avatar Body Collision, which "is a desktop theatre troupe in its own right". The Avatar Body Collision troupe is a "globally distributed performance group who live (mostly) in London, Helsinki, Aotearoa/New Zealand and cyberspace." They use a free, downloadable chat software to rehearse and perform their work.

Since 1997, Helen has been involved in the Magdalena Project, an international network of women in contemporary performance and theatre. She became involved with the New Zealand group, Magdalena Aotearoa, helping with the organisation of their 1999 International Festival of Women's Performance, and following that developed the Magdalena Project's first website. She became the project's "web queen" and continues to voluntarily maintain and update the project's web site and email list - since 2011 with the assistance of "web princess" Valentina Tibaldi. She has attended and presented her work at many Magdalena festivals around the world. Significantly, in 2001 at the Transit III festival (Odin Teatret, Denmark), she presented for the first time a cyberformance to a theatre audience; the audience response to this work challenged her to explore the intersection of theatre and the internet in her ongoing work and forms a starting point for her Masters' thesis.