the frankfurt book fair is currently happening, and new zealand is this year’s “guest of honour”; frankfurt is a mere 4 hour train journey from munich, & i would have loved to go – but with 3 big projects climaxing simultaneously over the weekend, it was impossible. such is the life of the independent artist – try as we might to spread our work out in a manageable timeframe, things do have a habit of clustering

the big event for me this weekend was the CyPosium, starting at 4pm CET on friday 12th, & finishing up at 3am saturday morning. an “online symposium on cyberformance”, the CyPosium featured presentations by 10 artists & researchers, recalling and discussing examples from the body of cyberformance created over the last 20 years or so. all but one of the presentations took place in the Waterwheel Tap, an online interface that facilitates audio-visual streaming as well as real-time manipulation of audio & images, & a concurrent text chat for the audience. the one exception was miljana peric’s presentation in UpStage, where we had a record attendance of 69 connected computers. all in all, the CyPosium was a great success – the presentations were inspiring, the audience was engaged & vocal, & the technology performed brilliantly.

barely was the CyPosium over when WWW:World Wild Web opened at Furtherfield‘s gallery in Finsbury Park, London. paula & i have an exhibit in this group exhibition, “Dave’s Quiz (part 2)”: this is a hard-copy multichoice quiz that people can complete in the gallery or download online, developed from our research for and performances of make-shift.

at the same time as all of this, the long-awaited new version of UpStage (v2.4.2) is about to be released; initially it was to be installed over the weekend, but – as often happens in the world of software development, cross-time-zone collaboration, & over-committed artists – we didn’t manage to complete the final testing in time. the up-side of this is that we also haven’t finished the new user manual, so now there is a bit more breathing space to get that done … but the 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance is rushing rapidly towards us, so there is precious little time to pause!!

all i can say is: YOGA!!!!! if it wasn’t for yoga i think i might go insane.