Helen Varley Jamieson

Who is Helen Varley Jamieson?

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 degree in Cyberformance from Queensland University of Technology entitled "Adventures in Cyberformance: experiments at the interface of theatre and the internet."