I have recently begun working on a project description that will take a fresh look at telematics in the particular subset of distributed performance. As mostly everybody nowadays, I have participated in a couple of distributed performances, with NYU Steinhardt, Stanford, Cervantino, re-new and others, between Europe, North- and South America. It is always a bit of a struggle, often due to signal degradation but always because of the delay incurred that makes direct action/reaction only possible in certain, restricted cases.

It seems that a different viewpoint would be beneficial, namely one that does not look at the distributed scenario as one that aims at true presence, but instead accept that it is a mixed-presence scenario with unsurmountable limitations. Instead, we will take a look at different distributed scenarios and how cognition handles mixed-presence and transforms it into a ‘locally true’ reality. It opens up to interesting questions such as whether several, partly intertwined local realities is a real possibility that can provide satisfactory local performance, can a local time-displaced reaction (video, audio) be made to contribute meaning in spite of being in response to earlier information etc.