2. Input/Output

Maintainance has been a hard task for any artist working with new media. When we started the collaboration with the museums few of them had a larger experience of working with technology. Even video and projectors were something quiet uncommon and the understanding of how sound worked in these situation was limited. In many ways nothing much has happened since then, the late 1990’s except for that the technology has become cheaper and it isn’t impossible for museums to work with projectors and video with a quiet good resolution and brightness. Still there is a skepticism against any media and often the staff at the museums takes it for granted that there will be problems when involving mew media pieces in the shows.

I would lie if I said we didn’t have technical problems, but they were always due to bad Internet connections or lack of knowledge of the museum staff. Only in three cases a piece stopped because of mistakes of the artists. Two of them because of lack of knowledge in MAX/MSP which was a quiet new experience when we had it for the first time in late 2003.

For the artist the technology maintainance, at least setting up a piece for about five weeks, was no problem. The problem was rather how to come up with an idea that was creating something new in real-time for the period. Many artists worked with different kind of input that would change over time and input that they knew would feed their piece during the performance. It could be a source on the Internet, television, radio, the weather outside, motions in the streets. The input was processed in different ways and the output often had very few traces from the original source.