PERTH: For a small band of bleary-eyed computer buffs tucked away in a Perth basement, New Year's eve was still a virtual reality well into New Year's day. They had been up all night and by early afternoon were about to celebrate their third entry into 1995 - this time in Dallas, Texas. - AAP, 1/1/95

The call was made for New Year's eve sometime back in October, I think, it was hard to remember having just come off the back of an encouraging but not entirely successful link with Vancouver and Atlanta in the middle of that month.

That was our first experience with Vidcall and raves, the idea being to open a windows across land and ocean for a three way voyeuristic gateway for individuals already keen on pushing certain other boundaries.

The window had come, but the population, oblivious to our experiment, must have been on the phone long distance to relatives that day, as the phones kept crashing and we were reduced to stilted images, text, and then nothing at all.

Like the Wright Brothers trying to get off the ground, the concept of a global cyber rave had caught all of our imaginations, but the equipment didn't quite seem happening when it came to the time for lift-off.

The Americans had been at it for some time now, Jelly Bean in Austin and Interaxshun in Atlanta making the connection down under to Philip Millson the East Coast and Revelation on the West.

Mills and Revelation had already been in the spotlight over Californian smart concoction Cloud 9. Mills had moved on to playing with CUSeeMe, as had Atlanta, so the decision was made to go with Macintosh and the Internet rather than risk using the international phone network again.

The concept behind a cyber-rave had begun, in my understanding, with some groups in Northern California using videophones. I'd been briefed by Laura Thompson and Wilson Leary of Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean had been combining robotics and video to produce their Zeus the CyberRave.

Meanwhile, someone else in the smart game put us in touch with Alex Carson in Atlanta, who was working with Jelly Bean to incorporate realtime link ups with her own cyber rave Interaxshun. Add Shining Light in Vancouver, and we had ourselves a transcontinental posse, a solid list of RSVP's for a 36 hour run and grab meeting on the net.

Due to time, our best bet to kick off the evening was to link with Mills' Synaesthesia at a rave in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo. The plan was to do an early transmission between our own event at the InterZone Club, Murray Street, around 9pm, and midnight celebrations in Sydney.

Second stage was a midnight transmission of performance art from 100% Local and then at 1am beam of Red Consensus and the burning car ritual.

Matters had become further complicated on the Saturday when we decided to link the experiment up with a nationwide woodchip protest, tackling Keating to consider his beliefs in the Creative Nation above the prospect of cutting down dwindling forests to reverse Australia's worst trade deficit this century.

After a week long search we'd finally found an independant sl/ip connectionin Highway1 capable of handling the volume of traffic without buckling. Relative newcomers to using home computers as multi-media broadcasting stations, the logistics of completing successful links, let alone a heady multi-camera imput operation, proved too much at five minutes to midnight when our system crashed.

The team of Digital Wizards, Gary Beilby and John Van Noort, and then Revelation art director Mike Rietveld, were well and truly on the way to enjoying the festivities themselves. Unable to re-start the system after a fault in our CUSeeme operation, we postponed the link until morning, where we would link the Rev basement with the raves in Dallas and Austin.

After some juggling at late night messages on answering machines, someone we'd picked up at the club re-patched CUSeeme and we were back and running; first touch, a guy by the name of Luke and his spotted Dalmation in Holland.

No sign on the raves, many beers had assured that with a 12 hour difference it was testing the crew who had stayed up all night and resorted to cranking up basement house band, the Children Of It for the small crew who had kept going in the absence of a functional system.

After some more filming early morning around the building, we proceeded to perform some form of spontaneous movement I could only later describe as a cyber dance called Shaking The Room, going wild whenever images ebbed and flowed in flurries according to the moving rate of exchange - our virtual bodies enhanced by a data projection able to perform feats of pixel contortion our flagging flesh and blood could not.

As midnight closed in on the East Coast of America we had only so far managed to get in touch with Interaxshun's rave on Cornell and Philip Mills, who was by now up again and having his breakfast deflected off Eden.

Set, we narrowcast a quickly edited version of the previous nights events, warts and all, fires and facades, performers and perforations, to give the crew going hard in Dallas a glimpse of why we all looked so shocking in the morning. Our party had been going for 15 hours and our minds were starting to chant turn down the Cyber-Barbie...

FOOTNOTE: We later discovered that Jelly Bean had used PC's on Vidcall and Panasonic videophones to link with cafes and other raves in the North using similar equipment, their Macs not really hitting up till way past our bedtime. To Philip and Alex, who I both got to finally see after many telephone conversations, a hearty G'Day. To Leary and Laura, who I have both met in the first person, I'll see you in cyberspace sometime mid-June.