Date: Thursday, December 11, 2009
Time: Afternoon

SPIKE is a collaborative network performance event by Andrew Oleksiuk at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Joe Reitzer at Argonne National Laboratory. The piece examines the beginnings of human communications, its evolution through speech, the dissemination of the written word, and enabling electronic media and network technologies. Using disparate elements to understand the codes, vocabularies, and grammars of cyberculture, the work examines the history of how culture is enabled and how to derive meaning from it. The performance event features a collaborative high-performance computing and communications (HPCC) infrastructure specifically using high-definition streaming audio, video, and 3D graphics to illustrate vignettes in communications and network history. The spoken word poetic aspect of the performance illustrates the primacy of oral communications, and recalls Artistotle who wrote of "spectacular equipment" in the theatre of his day.