My name is David Garcia and this is Adam Hyde. Together with Honor Harger and Eric Kluitenberg, we organise something called the Net Congestion Festival which is about streaming media. Adam is also a visual artist who specialises in making tools, tools for re-imagining how you might store information online. So we thought that rather than begin by talking about the Festival, we’d begin with Adam showing one of his creations.

(Adam)
My name is Adam Hyde, I’m part of Radioqualia together with Honor Harger. And together, Honor and I designed this tool called Frequency Clock. It actually has a lot in common with what Kristi was just talking about, with Napster and file sharing, taking off and redefining the Internet as to who exactly is a client and who is a server, which has innumerable consequences.

We are going to talk about Radioqualia project which has at its core a deep relationship to file sharing. It also has a relationship to designing software, of actually separating proprietary software from proprietary interfaces. And it is also about designing communities and building communities around associated interest or common interest (largely around taste).

The Frequency Clock is actually a difficult project to explain. I’ll just bring up the website here. It has mini-facets, it’s a website, it’s also a gallery installation, as we are an arts group, not a commercial operation. And it’s also a system by which you can remote control transmitters around the world; I’m talking FM transmitters, UF and VHF transmitters for television and radio. Now, the website has a lot of information written in our own arty lingo, but I just want to show you one particular aspect of FrequencyClock that relates strictly to this community-building idea, designing communities around associated interests. And also has a relationship to file sharing. And that is the timetabling mechanism.

Before I get too deep into it, I’ll explain a little bit first about the mechanisms involved. There are just two parts of it that you really need to understand. Just before I do that, this is about sharing of streaming media. Streaming media is not like MP3, which is a download and play media format. Streaming Media is all about experiencing the content as it’s coming across the network, so in essence you’re hearing it in real time, which is obviously of vital importance when you’re talking about live media coming across the Internet. Most people will probably be aware of radio stations on the Internet, or television over the Internet which you can watch live, and in fact this very conference is going out live on the Internet, and that’s all utilising streaming media.

Now, the two facets of the Frequency Clock that I’ll just point are the website for timetabling content, which lets you create your own timetable, or utilise someone else’s, and the software. We created this for Net Congestion, it's essentially a porthole to access content about this Festival Net Congestion, streaming media live content. I’ll just show the basic elements. We have on the right here a list of programmes, a very long list, at this stage we haven’t got a categorisation. On the left here a timetable that runs from a 24 hour clock, from zero down and seven days starting from today’s date. Your little mouse pointer tells you what time the pointer is on. If you wish to add a program, you can simply click on ‘add’ next to the program name and click on the timetable and you’ll see these boxes here change. So in a very mundane, but familiar metaphor, this is pretty much like creating your own television guide. It’s a mundane term to use, but you can see how you get a list of programs and then you form yourself a timetable based on the available programs.

Now, the second part of the formula is the Frequency Clock player. You have a list of schedules available to you. You choose a schedule, it might be your own or it might be a schedule completely open to anybody who has access to the Internet. Or it might be a schedule just available to a discrete community, which you only distribute the password to. When you press ‘go,’ this player follows the timetable that you’ve created and follows the TV guide, or radio guide whatever you wish to call it, it works both with video and audio. So if I press ‘go’ here, it checks in with the Frequency Clock database and it says ‘Oh, there’s another program to play, and it’s going to be played at 9:49 am’. I think there’s an active schedule here, Marno’s Choice. I can choose Marno’s Choice and I think there’s actually a program already scheduled to play.

What you just saw also is that there is a mechanism on the Frequency Clock player that if you click when there’s a program to be played, a video program, it will bring the program up on full screen.

As I mentioned earlier, the Frequency Clock has a number of assets, it’s a website, it’s also a gallery installation, but there’s this greater idea of the implementation of it on a global basis to control transmitters. And we actually have a transmitter in Amsterdam, an FM transmitter, it’s a 20-watt transmitter and it does exactly this. The way that it works is that we have a program schedule much like this. You choose the content that you want to add to the timetable and what happens is that the transmitter that is located in Amsterdam is next to a computer; the computer has a connection to the Internet. When the Frequency Clock is open on the computer, when the player realises that there is a program being scheduled it communicates to the transmitter and turns the FM transmitter on. Then the audio content goes from ‘audio out’ on the computer into the ‘audio in’ in the transmitter and becomes live in Amsterdam. So from anywhere in the world, you can actually turn this transmitter on and off. It turns on when there’s a program to be played and off when the program’s finished and you can control the transmitter in Amsterdam from New Zealand, we’ve done it from Australia, we’ve done it from quite a few places around Europe. And so you’re actually determining, through the Internet, what the local audience hears.

This, for us, was very important. We realised that the Internet is a privileged sphere, and we wanted to provide mechanisms that we could break out the interesting and diverse array of content that was available over the Internet, because it is basically, the world’s largest archive. And actually put it in the real world, so to speak. You have probably guessed that there are many more radios than there are computers and Internet connections. So this is a basis by which we can take information from the Internet and put it into the traditional media sphere.

Now, we also did an experiment with Salto Television, Amsterdam TV and we used the full screen mechanism, which I just showed you. And we actually allowed anybody from around the world that had access to the Internet to contribute programs to Salto television. We did this seven days prior to the Net Congestion Streaming Media Festival, which was about six weeks ago, and we had people adding programs through a simple web page to the Salto transmission. And you could sit at home if you were in Amsterdam and watch TV and actually change it from your desktop computer, so long as you had an Internet connection.

(David)
Thank you Adam. In a way, when we started organising the Net Congestion Festival, we addressed the basic question of whether the current hype about broadband and streaming media is justified. Can they allow the Net to deliver an experience as rich as traditional media, and are they even technically possible? In a way our answers to these questions, with reservations, were ‘yes’ and ‘yes,’ although maybe not quite in the ways that the industry, or we, can imagine.

The title, Net Congestion, neatly sums up our reservations about these transformations as well. But yes, it is a really big deal. There are currently about 80 million copies of these Real Players in circulation, and more than 30 million streams of content available online. Now, although these statistics don’t tell us much about the content or the quality, what they do tell us is that something momentous is happening. And that we are at the first glimmerings, the first dawn, of what is a fusion between the Internet and Broadcast Media. But we have in a sense, very little sense of what the implications of that are, what it actually means.

However, there was one conclusion that the editors of Net Congestion shared. That is, that what is new and exciting about these streams of rich media over the Internet is precisely that they are not television and radio on a computer.

So back to these players, now one thing that we need to keep in mind is that Real is not the only player in the game, there’s also Microsoft and Apple who have rival players. So where once there was the browser wars, we’re now well into the player wars. And like browsers, the players are not content to be tools, they also want to be portholes, directing you to content. And there’s quite a lot of content to which you’re being directed.

Now, it’s an interesting fact from a design perspective, that although Real won’t give you much help with this, it isn’t that much work and is perfectly legal to redesign these players for different kinds of contexts and different kinds of purpose. To give you just one example, Adam’s going to now talk about a player that was especially made for FreeB92. This was an independent radio station in Serbia, which came to represent the whole resistance movement of independent tactical media within Serbia to the Milosovitch regime. And now Adam’s going to show this player and talk about some of the reasons behind it and why it came into existence.

(Adam)
FreeB92, or HelpB92 was an organisation I became involved with which was created because of the NATO bombing of Kosovo in Serbia. And HelpB92 built an infrastructure in Amsterdam to help provide support for independent media within this area which was being bombed. We weren’t taking any sides; we were just creating space for independent media voices to exist. Which was obviously very difficult at the time.

We were called HelpB92 because there was an organisation B92, which is probably the most famous independent radio station in the world, or one of the most famous; and B92 was under threat during the NATO bombing, and so there were a number of various stages throughout this period, throughout which HelpB92 was able to support B92. First of all, one of the crucial parts of the war and the threat to B92 was when the Government took away the transmitter. They actually unplugged the transmitter for B92 and it wasn’t able to broadcast within Belgrade. It wasn’t able to provide an independent voice locally about what the situation was. So we assisted B92 by creating a website and maintaining some avenues for them. So that they could get information out.

Now, the next consequence was that the regime in Serbia removed the domain name of B92 from the B92 website, which is pretty much parallel to removing a transmitter from a radio station. You no longer have any focal point where you can access information. You can’t tune into it on the dial and you can’t type in www.B92.net because that entity no longer exists at that place. So this provided us with some food for thought and we wondered how B92 could maintain a media presence, and obviously local transmission was out of the question and the Internet provide the most viable possibility. So a number of things happened. Eventually they renamed themselves, but before that we worked with them to evolve a media player which would locate content which was only relevant to FreeB92.

So this is very much like your Real Player, except it’s customised, to only be able to access the most recent information relevant from and about B92. It’s a very small customised player, you can move it around very easily. You can download it with only a couple of hundred K. It has a lot of functionality, which tells you about B92, there are little pop-ups which tell you information about the player, for example, you can get access to the preferences, etc. But the important thing was the content of course, so embedded within the player itself are links that only go directly to information about B92. I’m just going to show you one of these. It plays audio and video.

So in essence, what we came to view the player as was an embodiment of the media entity known as B92. It no longer existed as a website, it no longer had a transmitter and we assisted with building this player which could be seen as actually representing this organisation. We had far more control over this, because the software could be distributed virally, it didn’t have any centralised point that could be taken over like a domain name and a transmitter does, also we could control the information through very simple configuration files, which were replayed on the player.

(David)
I think there are just a few more facts about B92. Basically, it’s a very important and paradigmatic example to us of a certain approach to media. Of course, when we were actually doing the festival the night before, the regime fell. A number of our guests were from Belgrade and were leading members of this independent media movement, including people from B92. The people who were at home looking at scenes from this rather classical revolution unfolding, the things like the storming of the Parliament, would have very little knowledge of the key role that independent media had in accelerating this process. And how much hybrid combinations of file sharing protocols and satellite links had kept information other that the state propaganda in the public domain.

Although things will have changed by now, during the dark days when the regime were jamming the signal, B92 was being downloaded from the Internet and distributed as an analogue broadcast from the BBC satellite and then re-broadcast to some 30 stations throughout the country. Transforming B92 from a regional into a national force.

Of course this has enormous implications for that locality's particular emergency, but it also has wide implications for the whole media landscape. B92 remains our paradigmatic example of perhaps our one overwhelming conclusion from Net Congestion, and that conclusion is that we are not monomedia. The whole media landscape is being transformed by these new protocols. All media are coming to mirror the core characteristic of the Internet, that is self-organisation, lack of centralised control. The media landscape, or perhaps a better word would be media ecology, is coming to treat any form of restriction, any form of censorship in the way that the Internet treats damage, by routing around it. And anyone in the information who tries to resist this process, from the mainstream music industry to President Milosevic, is discovering to their cost that the old solutions don’t work anymore.

Basically the situation in Belgrade happened at the moment of our festival, so an awful lot of partying went on, and a lot of tools were being developed for partying: VJ tools and so forth. Arcangel is going to show us later during the panel discussion, the tool he’s developed for partying.

But I think we just want to finish on a storytelling, a narrative approach, because many of these tool-builders make you feel that the narrative element is disappearing. But I think we’re realising that narrative is being re-invented on the Net, in different ways and I think one thing that is being introduced again is the notion of plot. Not simply plot in the sense of structuring narrative in order to keep your attention and to structure the events. But also plot in relation to space, the actual plotting of a journey through the Internet. This link between the unfolding temporality of narrative and the linkages with space are something that we feel most powerfully represented in the work of Nick Crow and I think we want to finish on that because I have a signal that we’re running out of time.

(Adam)
I’ll just give you a very brief demonstration of Nick Crow’s work. During Net Congestion, we had one particular panel called ‘The Network and The Narrative.’ It was formed because of this work, and also because of a debate between a presentation at Lux in London. It was about the network and narrative, and one question that was put was, does the network itself affect the way that story evolves? And how does the Internet have a play in actually building narrative? And one of the best examples that we’ve seen of this is this site by Nick Crow who demonstrated it at Net Congestion.

It looks like an Apple interface for making your Internet connection. You then arrive at a site which looks like it was made in 1993. It’s by Bob Taylor, it’s his home page. It has a little bit of a story about how he’s lost his daughter and he’s looking for her. He’s registered his daughter’s name, Angela Taylor, on various websites around the world. Nick Crow actually did this, this is a fictitious person, but he registered her name on these sites for missing persons. And you know how he’s a fan of Manchester United, blah, blah.

Now of course, this is a web page and the way that the story unfolds is through the link that everybody wants to go to, Yahoo!, obviously in this day and age it’s very unlikely that anyone would want to click to Yahoo!, but back in those days it was quite popular. And then we have a Shockwave interface, with some audio mini content playing in the background. And you can see Bob Taylor in the background, and this is actually Shockwave, whereas this was an html page; and this show Bob Taylor searching through Yahoo! And you can watch him during his day.

This particular artwork is very interesting because you’re never quite sure when it’s automated and it’s telling you a story, or when you’re part of a story yourself. Because often it pops you out into the Net itself and you don’t actually realise, whether you’re actually part of the presentation or live on the Internet. As you can see, now it’s Bob navigating, it’s not myself navigating, but if I hadn’t told you that as an audience, you would possibly never have realised. And actually I believe a lot of these links on this are live as well.

So it’s a very interesting intersection of traditional linear narrative, but it’s actually enfolding the Network within it. And it poses a lot of problems within the story itself, sometimes it’s difficult, you struggle with it, you’re not sure where it’s going, sometimes it’s obscured completely. Sometimes it takes you in directions you don’t know. But you always return, after closing all these windows, here we go, it’s actually a live Net site, not sure whether it’s part of the story or not, but when I close the windows, I realise I actually return to the story itself.

So it was one of the few examples that New Congestion editors had seen of actually involving the Internet within the narrative. And I hope that there’ll be evolution and exploration in these themes in the near future.