A suitably strong Wi-Fi connection can connect people for any manner of pursuits. Remote creative participation can remove many geographical restraints, meaning we can bring ‘dream teams’ together, diversifying talent, ideas and cultures.

Chris Shimojima has done just this for a recent live experiment called Signal Strength, which saw the writer/director/editor bring together a super group of New York subway musicians under the conduction of film composer Lev Zhurbin a.k.a Ljova.

Eleven musicians stationed at nine different sub-way stations connected to Skype and a click track, while Ljova positioned himself in Bryant Park (early on a Sunday morning when fewer people would be using the network) with 10 MacBooks and in real time, conducted a piece he’d composed especially for the experiment.

If you happened to walk by one of the musicians, you would not have noticed anything unusual, hearing only their instrument; you could however have heard the whole arrangement had you been with Ljova in Bryant Park or here at the artist’s Soundcloud.

It’s interesting to see the Internet allowing for real time physical collaborations. In a similar vein, the Collaborative Cooking machine was a contraption by Pjadad/Isberg that allowed up to five chefs to control the whole cooking process from their smart phones.