Hello Friends

First of all, I apologise I have not been able to communicate earlier. The 'Emerge' symposium continued untill lunch, when I had the first food of the day after early start to set up. Then onto next session, then taxi's, flights and home very late and ... well, here I am today, Monday.

You want to know what happened ofcourse...

The Synchronised Smoke was perfect, although we too lost Dagmar I think. You were there in the test call at 9.00am Dagmar, but I am not so sure at 9.35. I did my reading ... I hope you could hear it in Europe. The 'sound of smoking' was fantastic in NZ, we had a very good stereo system.

Anyway, Juergen's introduction was perfect and everyone was loving the Austrian and Swiss accents. Then M & M made the Festoon call and the image came up beautifully...but then it froze. Then we lost Skype as well. Then I was recalled into the group and we heard the beginning of Martin's 'Virtual Smoking' machine...just enough to get the idea...very nice...then...nothing.

I improvised by starting a discussion about the role of smoking as a language; a social ritual in relation to the chemo/nuerological effects, addiction, death drive and limbic resonance.

Meanwhile, Phil, the symposium technician had smoke coming out of his ears!

The entire network for Otago University had gone down! Furthermore, it stayed down all day having big impact on the other speakers, one having flown from Australia to speak about net art (with no internet access). Phil did not believe 'Festoon' had anything to do with it and the network in Otago had been very clean and fast as it was the weekend and not many users were online. We had a video conference with Jacky Sawatzky in Toronto about her 'RGB' project and it was perfect. Phil believed that someone had cut a cable! I could not even show the 'howl' website to activate plan 'B'!

Despite all this, our project was really very successful, the audience in New zealand were very interested in what we were doing. The 'Synchronised-smoke' was great and someone commented on the achievement of working together on such a project and getting it to this point.

I agree with Martin, that we should use this association we have to develop the next project. Smoking machine sounds very promising. Perhaps we could together develop 'blue print' over the internet, then individually build our own version of it in each country, then have another 'Smoke-in'. We could also look at other physiological or bodily actions...any ideas.

Also, I very much want to explore 'ivisit'. I think it has great potential as it is 'multi-platform', uses less bandwidth and is very stable. Would anyone be interested in running a test soon?

One other good news, I have been given a contact of a man in Amsterdam who is a very committed network artist, he is experienced with mixing sound also, which could be a good skill and...he smokes occasionally. Do you like the idea of extending our group?

Also, was recommended a book called 'Tommy' about World War One which talks about the role of smoking in the trenches; sounds very good section.

Best wishes from South Pacific
Marcus

Marcus Williams
Lecturer in Design
School of Design
Unitec New Zealand
09 815 4321 ext 7201

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