Love on a Wire

This past Sunday, as part of Vienna's Paraflows Conference this year on digital reconceptions of mind and matter, my girlfriend and I gave a talk on the technology and strategies of long-distance relationships. That we were able to jointly give the talk despite the fact that she was in New York at the time is just one more indicator of the futuristic present in which we live.

I'm not going to reiterate the content of the talk here (that can wait for when we write the paper), but based on the comments we got, it presented a good balance of the technical, media-theoretical, and poetic dimensions, just as talk on Long-Distance Relationships ought to. Johannes Grenzfurthner, one of the organizers of the conference (and partner in a LDR himself)  thought it systematized neatly a lot of the observations and stresses he had experienced in his own relationship.

I think it went really well, considering the number of possible technical failures that can happen when you hook up speakers and a projector to carry a skype video call through a netbook. Kudos to the organizers who had apparently upgraded the bandwidth after a failure of that sort of thing last year.

If you're interested in the basic content of the talk, our outline is available at http://www.southwaite.org/love_on_a_wire.html