But with this last piece, An Other Mother , they really used the webness of the Web. The first piece was simple. Sobell sculpted a porcelain figure onto an armature, then tore it off. The images that went out over the Web were silent, black and white, running in a stop action rhythm like a scene lit by a strobe. And those phantom spectators out there were creating the whole look of the piece-controlling the camera direction with mouse clicks, requesting the next image by clicking on the current image.
Live shows are still anomalies in cyberspace.
But when they began in 1994, Hartzell and Sobell made a survey of all the live video feeds to the Web and found just three or four in the world. Also, NYU had set up the Web's only pointable camera. It was just an inch square, and the artists mounted it on sort of a robotic eye socket invented by CAT colleague Richard Wallace. It could just about do a 180 . To some degree, this is the art of the future, and there's all that new language to learn, all that high tech to bring low.