The staging of 'networked' performances was especially useful because fundamental issues could be explored in short periods of time. This 'fundamental research' has informed my perception, my motivation and my analysis of the research carried out here.
The second issue that inspired me to undertake this research concerned the flaws in communication in the variety of collaborations. In design trajectories, people with different skills needed to collaborate, and we regularly discovered that we needed a certain skill only while actually 'making things happen'. One of the major issues in such collaboration was to find a way to discuss what we wanted to create. How does one discuss synchronization between natural and mediated presence and its effects? We set ourselves a design task in which we had to solve issues around the relationship between natural, mediated and witnessed presence in projects like the Reading Table for Old and New Media, Demi Dubbel and Pilotus for the Waag, in labs about broadband, multimedia labs, new literature labs and chaos lab. note 6Even though we often did not manage to communicate, by actually 'making things' we discovered a great deal. The absence of a language, of a conceptual framework, in which to discuss our work was very difficult at times and motivated me to undertake this study.
