yesterday i was one of four artists who collaborated in an improvised sound piece, initiated & coordinated/directed by annie abrahams as part of her current exhibition "if not you not me" at HTPP gallery in london.

we four improvisers were located around the globe, connected via an audio-visual web interface to create a live soundscape. annie gave us each a colour, & we each found 4 objects, one of each colour, which we displayed in our web cams. the protocol was that when we saw our colour in the web cam, we made sounds. listening and watching, responding and changing, we would build a soundscape from our disparate locations. in rehearsal, the concept and technology worked well and all seemed good for the performance.

i set my alarm, as i'm at home in new zealand at the moment and the friday night london-time performance was 9.30am on saturday for me. i got up, made coffee & breakfast, and turned on the computer. everything was fine. i cleared the browser cache & loaded the performance interface. everything seemed fine - the broadcasting screen showed black, as annie said it would before we started. i began streaming; this meant i couldn't see my own camera at the side anymore, & the main broadcast stayed black. i couldn't hear anything. i adjusted my headphones and waited patiently. and waited. patiently. i'm a seasoned cyberformer, i know that often events like this often start late for various reasons. i waited patiently.

then annie was skyping me, asking why i hadn't started; but the screen in front of me was still black! i couldn't hear anything! the others have started, annie told me. i think you have a lot of delay, typed annie, do as best you can. so i begin to move the objects in front of my web cam, and to make sounds into the void, trusting that the others are hearing. in skype, annie told me she can hear me, she can see the different coloured objects i'm showing. make sounds, she urges!

i feel like i am blind-folded and wearing earplugs; annie guides me, telling me when there is green, my colour, and telling me to stop showing yellow, maja's colour, because maja seems to have lost her connection. then annie asks me to use my voice. i start to whisper - can you hear me? are you there? i can't hear you! whispering into the void.

mysteriously, when annie stopped the broadcast in the gallery, the images suddenly appeared in my browser and i could hear everything. pascal & antje were surprised to learn that i didn't see or hear anything during the performance ... our online audience asked to see our instruments, who was playing what, who was which colour. we stayed chatting for as long again as the whole performance, and i saw & heard everything.

such are the vagaries of live performance on the internet! it reminded me of the only time i've been completely unable to give an online performance - a skype performance as part of open borders curated by adriene jenik. i was all ready to go, and at the exact moment that adriene told me to start, my web cam inexplicably went black. by the time i'd restarted skype, she'd had to move on to the next performer, & wasn't able to reschedule my performance. at least this time, it was only me who was shut out; the performance still went ahead & was appreciated by the audiences - online and at the gallery. annie recorded the soundscape & it's now playing in the gallery (listen here and links to documentation here). it's really interesting to listen to it now & remember how my own input was done from the void.

i want to do it again, "properly", just to see what will happen! but i also think this unexpected way, with the rules snatched away from me at the last minute, produced a pretty good result to : )