The Phantom Supercomputer

Artist and Canadian Technorati Michelle Kasprzak has blogged the Vivid Hothaus Progression Seminar where we gave our Creative Supercomputing initiative its first public airing. What she didn't blog (hey it was a long day) was something really interesting that emerged from our presentation. After we'd waxed lyrical for 40 minutes on the joys of building a technology project in an arts establishment one canny member of the audience wondered whether we were really building a computer cluster for the arts, or whether we'd just made it up, and whether it mattered either way. Indeed it's becoming rapidly apparent here that the catalysing and political/social power of technology is as much in its promise as in the delivery. Its the notion of the Internet as a connective force, for example, that has transformed the way we think about the world as much as the computers, software, and telecommunications that it's built from. Another way of putting this is: If we didn't have a Creative Supercomputer, people would have to build one.