Hi NBers, For those of you that chose not to tune in as voyeurs on our dinner (dining as spectator sport?!) I just want to give a public cheer to Pollie and also to share some reflections on a playful and enjoyable experience.
Pollie designed an elegant telematic dinner-setting using an live image of the remote table-top, projected down onto our physical table-top, next to our own dinner settings. There was excellent food. According to the Latitude rules we all cooked a Russian course. During the later part of the evening we all observed (and this has come up before in my encounters with Annie Abrahams's work with telematics and networked performance) that we found ourselves regressing to a teenage condition of relating...flirty and playful - free from the more careful observances of appropriate attention to ones' fellow diners. Perhaps it is the effect of technical precarity (there is something inherently rebellious about the technology- it just cannot be relied upon to behave). The reduction in raw sensory data (necessitates risk-taking - we have to do more guessing than usual about what our remote guests mean by their gestures, words, audio expressions). In addition to the disruption of the audio visual signal, Pollie's physical set up forced us to relate to our remote guests via an image projected downwards on to the horizontal plane of the table. Ordinarily guests' mutual verticality is very much a part of how they relate (perhaps until later in the evening for the more adventurous;). We all played hard to compensate for this. Perhaps the tech set-up could be more fully anthropomorphised as a sassy but uncontrollable teenager and listed as the hostess of future dinners: ) So the telematic kissing, and the stroking, and the drawn lips, and the lying (uncomfortable and contorted) with our heads on the table to gaze and laugh into the camera for each other are what I remember.... along with the analogue instant messaging and competitive joke telling. I recommend Annie Abrahams libidinous telematics here http://bram.org/toucher/TBK.html and just in case anyone hasn't seen it already Paul Sermon's telematic dreaming http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/telematic-dreaming/ Any more for any more? We also got to express our identities as differently located groups to each other by swaping revolutionary slogans and competitive joke telling. The telenoika guests were wonderfully quick to assert the FOSS alternative www.indenti.ca to www.tw**ter.com when they thought we might be in need of a little political training; ) I am really excited by the subversive possibilities this opens up for non-suited networked communication- if one were able to really embrace and explore the range of potential relational wormholes that the experience throws up. Because dinners are such key sites for power-broking and decision-making it would be good to see this developed so that we could imagine non-artists and researchers enticed to play and communicate in this way- changing what gets thought about, decided and acted upon. Thanks Pollie and Brittany great stuff. cheers Ruth _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
