Telematic music transmission, resistance and touch

This article retraces the history of telematic performance from early videophone experiments by the Electronic Café in the 1980s, through a series of ambitious digital art installations at museums like the Centre Pompidou. Onto this history, I map a series of netmusic projects I initiated in this period, from ISDN performances at the Sonar Festival to my installation Global String at Ars Electronica. This sets the context for collaborative online performances held during the COVID pandemic with artists like Paul Sermon and the Chicks on Speed. I finish by describing the Hybrid Live project connecting Goldsmiths and Iklectik Art Labs in London with Stanford University's CCRMA and SFJazz in California. I describe the low latency audio transport used, the importance of audiovisual synchronisation and the computer vision abstractions resulting in a London-New York remote dance performance. By situating current work in these histories, and closely examining the qualities of the network necessary for the transmission of a sense of embodied experience – and therefore trust – we understand that network performance occurs in its own space, one distinct from physical co-presence.