MARCEL has been quiet for some time but not inactive.  Several members have continued to explore multicasting artistic and educational collaboration over high bandwidth networks and members have been installing platforms and connecting. 

We organized a European consortium to request 7 million euros from the European Commission to build the platform throughout Europe.  We were turned down in a fashion which led to our understanding that the symmetrical aspect of multicasting is being blocked by industry as a money-loser.  We’ve decided to proceed country by country over the academic network and have advanced in France and the UK with other countries showing interest.  The project is called, MaP, Multicasting art Platform, MaP-MARCEL.fr, MaP-MARCEL.UK, MaP-MARCEL.Norway, etc.

Our habitual platform, Access Grid, has disappeared but we have several sites experimenting with other possibilities and in France we are using Jitsi, recommended by the Renater, the French academic network, https://jitsi.org/Main/Download.  It looks like it could be developed to respond to our needs.  Other members are working with Openwebrtc.  We are still pursuing the idea of a MaxMSP-PureData interface.

Also in France, we are creating working groups exploring specific disciplines to advance the network potential.  At this moment there are workshops in theatre, music, dance, smart video games, drawing, art and the environment and cinema in preparation.  The theatre workshop will be a Franco-British collaboration which has been initially funded from UCL in the UK.

A MaP working group site is in preparation and will be accessible through the mmmarcel.org by the end of the month with the appropriate contact information for all working groups.