My Residency in Banff, Alberta, Canada

Mixed day yesterday. In the morning tried another recorded run to the Vermillion Lakes Road. It was another glorious day, but still pretty cold: -13 with a wind-chill of -25 but sunny. I needed all the layers I had on.
The sun made a difference to the whole run and to the recorded footage -much better contrast and much more colourful. I’m looking forward to taking some still photographs. Managed to do the run non-stop, which I’m very pleased about- I must be getting used to the altitude. Quite slow though and my breathing is erratic and heavy. On the way back I overshot the Fenland trail and found myself almost joining the highway. I turned back, but it probably added 2km to the route.
Got back pretty exhausted around midday which gave me a couple of hours to recuperate before meeting Kenny at 2. We decided to do the testing on the ground floor of the building where the New Media Institute in based and where I have my studio. The AVDC converter (which takes the feed from my recording unit to the computer), only runs on mains so we had to use a 100ft lead to get enough slack to allow me to run freely. It looked quite a sight and rather odd! We managed to get the live streaming to work in the end through ‘i-chat’, but the picture quality particularly on the receiving computer was very poor. It was really disappointing after all that, but I wasn’t entirely surprised as i-chat is very basic. Kenny suggested I research other live streaming software, which when I got back to the studio I remembered I already had- a week ago! I remember speaking at length to Robert about using VLC, which is a media player that also supports live video and audio streaming (apart from it doesn’t do it for Macs, I later found). It seems that most software for this only works with PC’s- I’m beginning to realise that if I want to take this any further when I get back to London, I’m going to have to invest in one (or 2 if I still want to work with both eye views), of those tiny ee-pc’s, especially since the way we’re going (at least for these current tests), it looks like I’ll be running with them!
I was a bit done in for the rest of the day following my run and probably dehydrated. I had a splitting headache all afternoon and evening. I went to an informal concert of contemporary classical music with flute and percussion. It didn’t help. Later, Bruce, one of the other artists, hosted a Flusser night. This was an introduction to the ideas of image and media theorist Vilèm Flusser, followed by a televised interview with Miklós Peternák. Turns out that Bruce is a Flusser expert as he has been working on the archives in Berlin. Must read more of Flusser’s work.