The art of being in two places at the same time

An article of mine was just published in the online version of Leonardo Music Journal , an annual from MIT Press. The piece focuses around a few specific co-located performances I did with a group of musicians back in 2007-2008. In short (and in layman's terms) a good deal of research has gone into the possibility of musicians performing together, at the same time, with zero latency (no discernible delay at all) in completely different places via high bandwidth internet.

For example, one concert we did included musicians from Seoul, South Korea, Troy, New York, Palo Alto, California, and Montreal, Quebec (Canada) all playing the same score. As you can imagine, this is a strange and beautiful and entirely unnerving experience. Really, think about it for a moment.

So the published piece gathers six perspectives ( me, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Weaver, Mark Dresser, Jonas Braasch and Chris Chafe) about the experience. The articles range from the highly technical, talking about what kind of hardware and software was used, to my own admittedly luddite-ian thoughts about the time space continuum.

I wrote about how many years ago a very close friend of mine moved to Greece and we missed each other deeply. As this was before the current internet world, we couldn't afford the phone calls and letters somehow lacked the closeness we desired. So we began making audio tapes and sending them back and forth. Anyway, I'll leave the rest to the article if you're interested. The only problem is that I can't seem to find a way to read it for free, and it seems they are charging $12 just for the one article!

They didn't give me access either so, you know.....at some point I'll find out about copyright, and at least get my portion of the piece up hear for any willing minds.

Nevertheless, some links for you here:

you can read (for free!) the first page.. Or pay $12.00 for the article (click the pdf link on the page)

or subscribe to the journal (web and printed) in full.

Posted by jeff pitcher at November 19, 2009 05:59 PM

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