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!
a couple of times using computers in internet parlours I had a usb webcam that had inbuilt microphone, so in order to be heard I had to hold the microphone (and the webcam it was embedded in) up to my mouth, providing closeup face images as well as dialogue.
selfworld looks like a really interesting platform to experiment with, & i have tried a number of times to go there, either just to explore or to see something. but apart from one time when you were rehearsing & i was watching for a short time, i’ve been unable to get the platform to work on my computer. it could be that my computer is too slow – it’s a 4-year old G4 iBook so it is not the fastest machine, but i’m able to access other multi-cam platforms without difficulty so i wonder what it is about selfworld that makes it difficult?
Helen, Ivan Chabanaud changed server and is trying to improve it. So, I will definitely transmit.
Otherwise, even if James had problems at times when in Yogyakarta to send his webcam image, he could still watch the activities in the room.
did you try with your new computer? hmmm! do you have a new one?