In December 2011 a telepresence meeting was organised simultaneously
in Hangar, Barcelona, and Laboral, Gijón, with temporary connections
to Poitiers and Montréal. Using the Scenic software developed by the
SAT in Montréal and a high speed fibreoptic connection we were able to
carry out, for a week, an experiment in working together at distance.
Not only did audio and video data transit through the network but also
multiple sensor data - humidity, light, pressure, on/off.
Intact carried out a performance: http://vimeo.com/37058260
The distributed group was exceptional - Marcel·li Antúnez,
Minipimer.tv, Intact, Alg-a, Jorge Luis Marzo, el pueblo de china,
Paula Pin and many more who had responded to the open call - but there
were moments when communication failed. It was very interesting to
note, once again, the importance of affective bonds that create
effective communication at distance. The large and heterogenous group
spread between two distant points meant that often the attention was
put more in the local than the distant. Often we failed to create a
real sense of being together. It was not so much a technical question
as a human one. Much more work is required to develop the emotional,
organisational and technical skills for collective telepresence to
become truly operative - I believe that this is an area that
institutions, with their access to high speed networks and spaces
equipped for large numbers of people to gather, should be developing
and researching. It will be absolutely critical in the future and a
fundamental function of a cultural centre.
Some weeks later La Quimera Rosa arrived in the lab to work on their
Sexoskeleton, a wearable dispositive that makes visible the vital
signs of the body - heart, galvanic skin response, humidity. This data
can be transmitted by internet to anywhere in the world, like the
sensors in the ecoLAB, another project that began in 2011 in LABoral
(although since I left they seem to be broken). This possibility to
FEEL at distance opens new and astounding possibilities for the
imagination and the connection.
The project that won the Next Things convocatory, a joint project
between the Telefonica research labs and LABoral, Mapocci by Laura
Malinverni and Lilia Villafuerte, also goes in this sense and in the
Bogotrax festival in 2012 Victoria Sinclair and the festival team are
organising telepresence sessions in the district prison in Bogotá,
Colombia. Its a powerful metaphor, opening cracks in the walls of the
prison.
The Mapocci proposal seeks to provide new ways of remote
communication, capable of generating empathic networks between
children in different places, facilitating cultural exchange and
offering a tool for sharing and understanding the emotions of others.
Mapocci is a device based on a wireless connection system which
through a structure of sensors, sound actuators and exchangers allows
for the remote communication of emotional states. The mechanism is a
stand-alone device and does not require a computer in order to operate
but a minimum of two devices connected to each other. Each one belongs
to a child and the physical interactions with a model will be
reflected in the behaviour of the other one and vice versa. In this
way, the non-tangible interconnected links that exist between all
human beings, and the active role played by each one in determining
the sensations and emotions of the other one, are highlighted.
Due to cuts in funding, the LABoral telepresence experience has been
shut down but Hangar in Barcelona is carrying on with the experiments
- if anybody is interested to work on this they should let me know.
In Catalunya there is also the i2cat foundation -
http://www.i2cat.net/ - which is using the academic networks for
cultural experimentations.
best
pedro
On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:46 PM, roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Jack
>
> yes both networked infrastructures and networked organisations are
> relevant here=
> since they often overlap
>
> do you know about the Marcel network ?
>
> http://www.mmmarcel.org/
>
> they do a lot of infrastructure networking
>
> one of the topics at the us national science foundation workwshop was that there
> is a proliferation of infrastructure network projects - but that are
> not cross linked
> and duplicate effort
>
> roger
>
> Hello Roger and all,
>
> Is there development of high-speed optical networking so that people
> are able to meet with their data sets across oceans? Or are we
> speaking here of other kinds of networking. I have read through
> Roger's ongoing reports on the series of NSF Art Science workshops and
> have not seen any talk about this subject. Are the storage archives
> for large data sets in a cloud that is available to multiple entities?
>
> I am convinced that our networking needs to include actual optical
> connections to one another- but it is extremely difficult to get that
> up and running. The problems for me have been funding and getting
> people on board who have never really seen or experienced what is
> possible. Our CIO is now supporting small steps so that other faculty
> will be able to see with their own ideas. For Instance, UNM just did a
> series of Ursonate performances over the National LambdaRail between
> Supercomputing11 in Seattle and the Center for Advanced Research
> Computing. We were rehearsing and working out potential problems
> before a Spring Fluxus Concert between Swinburne U. of Technology,
> Melbourne, and UNM. These are baby steps designed to show people
> potential.
>
> It is great to network- but we need to be able to do this without so
> much physical travel. How do we make high-speed optical networking
> available for a larger group of people in different communities?
>
> Can anyone comment on this- with your own experiences?
>
>
> Jack Ox
> Roger Malina is Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de
> Marseille Provence and Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications
> at MIT Press
> and member of the steering committee of IMERA the Mediterranean
> Institute for Advanced Studies.Postal Address: OAMP, 38 Rue Joliot
> Curie, Marseille 13388, France
>
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