Páll Thayer
One of the cool artists who came over from Iceland for the Moncton conference was Páll. He’s doing some very cool stuff with sound and images that evolve and interact with people over time. At the conference he showed “Choirpiece for Four Computers.” Using some iBooks and an Airport base station one iBook lead the “choir” of 4 networked computers by sending notes for them to sing. The notes have to fit within a certain scale and when they are sent the image of a mouth on the screen of the computer opens and the note is played. Very neat. The coolest thing was “Intercontinental Spontaneous Jam Session” which allows multiple people to change the parameters of sound and images that play from a server and are sent out to whoever is connected to the site. The photo has the interface for the ISJS and Páll’s silhouette It’s a very cool combination of a server where sounds are generated using PureData along with PHP and Javascript to do some processing and Flash for the visuals. I can’t wait for it to launch so more people can see and experience this.
I’ve known about Valérie’s work before, but I met her for the first time in person at the conference in Moncton and we were on a panel together. She’s one of those multiplying hats people where she’s an artist and a curator. Not just any curator (not to disparage curators as I haven’t known very many), but one of the very few curators of net.art in Canada. As an artist she’s responsible for the neat and useful 
The first person that I met on my way to the ACS Conference in Moncton was Mathieu. He was driving the van to the airport in Halifax to pick up me along with 3 artists from Iceland, one from Newfoundland and one from Ireland, who happens to be Saoirse. Mathieu’s a cool interdisciplinary artist based in Moncton and Saoirse is a cool new mediator from Ireland but currently living in Scotland. (Again with the where were you born, where are you living, where have you lived…) They had a joint performance piece that unfolded over 3 days at the conference. It was based on the works of Samuel Beckett and combined live performance with recorded video. The pictures show Mathieu performing and Saoirse editing. A very neat combination of old media (the human voice and body) with new media.
On the first night of the Atlantic Cultural Space conference in Moncton Andrea Cooper wrapped up the “Nymphs of the Night” show with a great presentation about her real-world and virtual project “
The second person I met on my way to the Atlantic Cultural Space Conference was Birgitta. She’s an artist from Iceland (location seems to determine so much…at least when you meet people… “Hi, where are you from?” starts off the conversation so often at conferences… it usually implies where were you born, where did you live, where are you living… but I digress) and she read some poetry, showed some of her printed work and work online. She talked about a project she’s involved with that is producing two books 
