BIG Culture

This article retraces the history of telematic performance from early videophone experiments by the Electronic Café in the 1980s, through a series of ambitious digital art installations at museums like the Centre Pompidou. Onto this history, I map a series of netmusic projects I initiated in this period, from ISDN performances at the Sonar Festival to my installation Global String at Ars Electronica. This sets the context for collaborative online performances held during the COVID pandemic with artists like Paul Sermon and the Chicks on Speed. I finish by describing the Hybrid Live project connecting Goldsmiths and Iklectik Art Labs in London with Stanford University’s CCRMA and SFJazz in California. I describe the low latency audio transport used, the importance of audiovisual synchronisation and the computer vision abstractions resulting in a London-New York remote dance performance. By situating current work in these histories, and closely examining the qualities of the network necessary for the transmission of a sense of embodied experience – and therefore trust – we understand that network performance occurs in its own space, one distinct from physical co-presence.

We present SensaBubble, a chrono-sensory mid-air display system that generates scented bubbles to deliver information to the user via a number of sensory modalities. The system reliably produces single bubbles of specific sizes along a directed path. Each bubble produced by SensaBubble is filled with fog containing a scent relevant to the notification. The chrono-sensory aspect of SensaBubble means that information is presented both temporally and multimodally. Temporal information is enabled through two forms of persistence: firstly, a visual display projected onto the bubble which only endures until it bursts; secondly, a scent released upon the bursting of the bubble slowly disperses and leaves a longer-lasting perceptible trace of the event. We report details of SensaBubble’s design and implementation, as well as results of technical and user evaluations. We then discuss and demonstrate how SensaBubble can be adapted for use in a wide range of application contexts – from an ambient peripheral display for persistent alerts, to an engaging display for gaming or education.