Closing the Loop 2000

11/9/99

A project to take place in Adelaide in association with the Adelaide Festival, as a part of the Biomachines project.

The main thread of this is the theory and practice of collaborative network radio usage. The project will involve the development of some tools for the effective collaborative use of distributed audio networks and the training of local (e.g. SA) practitioners in their usage. The end results of the project will include an introductory Net-Radio-HOWTO document and some tools for net radio environments.

The parties actively involved in this project are Radioqualia, an Australian based network radio and sound group and Time's Up, an Austrian group working with appropriate technology, science and various old and new medias.

The main organisational partner is the Biomachines project, a performance and installation project that is taking place as a part of the Adelaide Festival 2000. It is planned that the results of this project will find application in the Biomachines events as a medium to be used for the project.

The project will take place from mid January until mid February, incorporating one or more public performances as well as several public or semi-public experiments. This project allies closely with the CTL98 project organised by Time's Up in Linz, Austria in 1998. As such it is planned to use public experiments as an avenue of access to the public, as was then done. Most important is the laboratory style documentation of these public experiments so as to make the insights from them available to the wider community.

Protoscientism, using scientific methods and methodologies in order to arrive at results of some rigour without falling prey to the needs and wants of the academy - the dangers of tenure and academic institutionalisation. Time's Up's project Closing the Loop 98, a series of Laboratories that took place in Linz, Austria, over the summer of 1998, taught them much about the whys and wherefores of a protoscientific attitude. For this project they will collaborate directly with the Australian group Radioqualia to invesigate a shared area of interest, the creation of extended collaborative spaces connected by the net.

Moving away from the big-budget situations of the major media laboratories with their "size counts" attitude towards bandwidth, this project aims to develop, amongst other things, a collection of tools and a deeper understanding of the problems and possibilities of long distance low bandwidth communication. These tools will be tested and this understanding honed with a series of net-based and semi-public events over the period of the laboratory, culminating in a larger collaborative event. The results of the experiments will be published in a form approriate for a "Collaborative net sound HOWTO" to make the learning curve as easy as possible for those interested in this area of research and work. The ease of understanding will be tested by introducing several Adelaide based individuals into the secrets of net sound and handing the project over to them.

--->ctltheory Mailing List