Real Time Live

Live television is well known. Live broadcasts on TV are exciting, exceptional, dangerous. On the Internet, where communication is extremely fast and webcams continuously capture everyday reality, the term ‘live’ however has acquired a different meaning. Webcams are like the security cameras in public buildings that record every movement by passers-by. At the same time, Internet makes it possible for people to react directly to each other and evoke the live experience in all its intensity. What does the notion ‘live’ mean in participating media like the Internet?

Josh Portway
Josh Portway is a designer of games, animator and artist and he works for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Multimedia, where he developed for instance the interactive music site Different Drum. This site brings music styles from all over the world together and allows the user to link them together. In addition, the music samples can be mixed to create an entirely new variation: live interactive music on the Net. Portway gives a demonstration of Different Drum and talks about some of his other projects focussing on the live experience and the visualisation of live events.

Linda Stone
Linda Stone is head of the Virtual Worlds Group of Microsoft, a research department that she founded several years ago. She designs so-called MUD environments on Internet for the Microsoft Netwerk. A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Dimension) is a virtual meeting place where people can come together, talk, play a role in a story, play games or make music together. Stone investigates for Microsoft for instance how communication can be improved in virtual worlds. She explains the potential that Internet offers for live communication.

Diller + Scofidio
Refresh is the name of the first on-line art project by the architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who no longer restrict their activities to architecture. Twelve webcams, set up in offices all over the world, follow the everyday activities of the staff. Alongside these ‘reality pictures’, Diller + Scofidio have invented a story around each location that reconstructs events through time like a soap. The result is a reflection on the influence of live video on everyday life. (http://www.diacenter.org/dillerscofidio)

Jay David Bolter
Jay David Bolter is co-director of the New Media Center and professor at the School of Literature, Communications and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has written several books, including Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (1991). His latest book Remediation, that he wrote with Richard Grusin, is about the way in which new digital media such as the Internet and virtual reality borrow from and compete with older media such as film, books, television and photography. Bolter examines the changes that have affected the notion of ‘live’ in the new media.