Guy van Belle
«Anyware»

I urged some friends-artists to form a group in Brussels called 'code31'. And soon similar groups began to emerge in Prague, Brno, Bratislava, Tokyo, Sofia, etc...
The event was called 'Anyware' and it was Milos Vojtechovsky - a good friend from a media center and Radio Jeleni in Prague - who came up with the idea to do a piece based on the Tony Conrad 1972 drone-classic 'Of the making of man and womankind'.
As usually, we started to collect materials and explore ideas on our website (see http://anatomix.waag.org and http://code31.lahaag.org), and apparently after mailing to the several lists we are running, we decided to create a realtime connected piece containing:
- a group of musicians, audiovisual streaming, from Prague
- 2 audiovisual streams from Brussels (me) and Tokyo (Akihiro Kubota)
- 1 local artist in New York (Hae Young Kim on Gameboy)
As a basis for this we took scanned synthesis, one of the latests physical modelling techniques developed by pioneer Max Mathews. We ended up on both sides activating 2 strings by exchanging over TCP-IP the information of both our synthesis parameters. We also fed a small visual matrix (60 * 40 pixels) with colors based on this information and sent this out to each other, analysing it, and mixing it again together at each end. As such, we created a feedback system based on the oscillation over the net of the same data (but with a time difference) for audio and visual synthesis. The output was streamed out using the free Quicktime Broadcaster and the open source Darwin Streaming server at Waag Society Amsterdam. So each of the groups could selectively receive (and use as an input) 3 streams with sounds and images from Prague, Tokyo and Brussels. This was mixed at the Kitchen New York where Hae Young Kim joined in on Gameboy.

Source: Guy van Belle: »Teil eines verbundenen Kollektivs«, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 165/5, Sept./Okt. 2004