trials on Selfworld

Since March, am doing some trials on Selfworld with ActiveLayers (with Cherry in London and Liz in Kawerau (NZ) and James and I in Brisbane).  Ivan Chabanaud comes sometimes to our meetings to tweak the server and our room, and in some pix, played Gulliver demonstrating how to use the encoder as a moving backdrop….

We are working on theme of water…made few movies, gather some images and songs, and try to find scores that we can do online.
The use of multi-video streams is powerful,  opening up a lot of possibilities but it needs a lot of tweaking and patience, above all for the sound.  But somehow being able to see each other is a big reward which gives us all the patience needed! It gives definitely another space to ‘perform’, a space of intimacy, closeness, macro details, computer’s immediate surrounding, but also outdoors, public spaces, landscapes…

In Yogyakarta (Indonesia), we bought a 3G stick, and continued our trials  from here, just beside a paddy field. James went to internet cafes/parlours to have a separate connection.  He could not put his own laptop on the network, and had to use the local computer/webcam….which once was pretty fuzzy (because of fungi growing with humidity)… but other time, were quite interesting cause not in-built in the computer, giving freedom to film around and have various angles. Because we didn’t have access to printers, we start using other devices with mini-screens to show images (iphone & digital camera), sketches, little objects, using also paper that we were tearing on the spot to shapes… great immediacy, interesting aesthetic, fine movements of hands… to be continued!