Lovely Lustig Latency

GLTI.CH Karaoke has been on hiatus, but that doesn’t mean its ceaseless energy has ceased! No. No. No. No. No.

Spinning into my Facebook feed today was a piece at Slate on a new project by Raymond J. Lustig’s called : Latency Canons.

Working with the New York-based American Composers Orchestra and a carefully tuned hookup on Google Hangouts, Lustig and his team orchestrate musical ‘canons’, pushing bandwidth delays into melodious syncopations between NY and Manchester, UK.

The project is an obvious homage to GLTI.CH Karaoke, delivered with such a fine degree of modesty that Lustig was too embarrassed to mention us. That’s OK Lustig. We understand and hope to see the kitsch and high-art music worlds pulled closer together through projects such as this. How about putting the orchestra back into Karaoke? After all, the word KARA-OKE is a portmanteau coinage of KARA ’empty’ and OKE ‘orchestra’.

We love Latency Canons, lovely Lustig, and we’d like to sing with you.

It’s exciting to see the potential of latency used to such creative effect. What’s more, to have such a strong emotional response from an audience, tweaked through simple, off-the-shelf software (this is the GLTI.CH Karaoke philosophy). The possibilities of latency play was explored to its experimental environs by Kyoung Kim, Ryan ⊥ Dunn and Edwina Portocarrero for their Supraconductivity series, delivered in the run up to GLI.TC/H 2112. The final ‘performance’ included an hour-long video chat in which Ryan battled extreme 3G latency and the cold Chicago winds in order to find and converse with a dog. It was a special moment, extended to 60 nail-biting minutes of glitches, audio-visual sludge and bandwidth feedback. The GLI.TC/H community revelled and regrouped, safer in the knowledge that LOVE OF FAILURE was what bound us.

We have exciting project news to announce soon, but for now, keep Google Hangingout, TinyChatting and PLAY THAT LATENCY JUST LIKE LUSTIG!