Above is a basic overview of the layout for the DBG/Moore performance. The projection system featured 9 projectors (four for the walls, four for the illuminated cubes, one for the main scene background), driven by 9 computers (4 G5's, 4 Intel Mac Minis and 1 Intel Laptop). A tenth computer, my personal laptop, was the central driver.
Basically, this central control computer sent OSC messages to the other 9 computers which forced them to conform to scene changes. The videos were not hard sync'd, so there was no need to have a timing source. However, the central computer did send out "ping" messages, since otherwise we were finding that the network interfaces would fall asleep on the G5's and would stop responding after a while.
We created our own network using a Netgear router not connected to anything. My only mistake: we named the network "DBGONLY", which apparently was too interesting for some hacker-types to withstand. All afternoon I was fighting with people hopping on the network and dumping my systems off. I finally locked down the network and everything was fine.
It felt pretty cool to sit along the side of the room and control this whole system from behind a podium. Felt like God - or at least like the Wizard of Oz.
[ddg]
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