tziteras

I came across all these links looking at Miguel de Icaza's blog Danah Boyd speaking about social networking sites such as Myspace , and funny things that happen when you don't check how your data is coming from properly (although that's always hard to do when your audience is made up of teenagers) Second Life Client: A distributed grid application, now running .mono! http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/1/94138e2a-d9dc-435a-9240-bcd985bf5bd7/Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv Lots of blogs on social networks, and distributed grid game/build environments

Networks are by their nature, failure prone. Whether you are talking about a person in your extended network turning up as requested to a place, or a computer not crashing when you need it, you can't really control the remote points. But you can "influence" it - devote more time to any node and give it incentives such as quick replacement arrangements, money, systems administrator time etc. In working on the Locating Grid Technologies workshop series' last practical event, we had to take this into account. I envisioned the connections as being a central set of maybe 2-3 nodes that we really checked up on and ensured would be functioning on the day, and then as many other nodes as needed, but with no checks or involvement from us. In a much larger network we'd have had the chance to test out many more of the fallacies/problems/opportunities of distributed computing, but I'm impressed at how much a social/performance event resembles a generic computer procedur...

So much has been done already around the AG and we're all just doing the same little things with it to get it to the next level. It's quite clear what it needs: *Good quality sound *Streaming Tools - maybe grid enabled annotation devices, or just note pads, but that work across and take full advantage of the medium *Moving cameras *DJ-VJing/advanced editing/processing capabilities. *Tools to deal with latency and compression faults imaginatively. The interesting thing is that a lot of these problems are solved technically in other video/audio transfer software available already around the web, or in people's studios. What is missing is the link between universities and artists to make things happen. What about a series of funded performances in partnership with willing institutions, in return for some publicity for their meeting rooms? It's also a great medium for collaborative performance, of the really deep higher art kind - because it allows for intensity and over st...