Kolo and Nebesko: a distributed media control framework for the arts

Increasingly, artists employ distributed multimedia in live performance, themed entertainment, and media art. One barrier they encounter is the interconnection of physically distributed sensors and computational units for the control of media elements. To address this need, UCLA´s HyperMedia Studio created Kolo, a Java-based framework for the collection of sensor data and the control of distributed media devices, and Nebesko, a scripting language for managing a Kolo network´s state. Kolo presents developers and application authors with a simple and consistent control framework for their distributed applications while Nebesko provides distributed state management for manipulation of the network. Nebesko also enables non-programmer to create and use Kolo networks. This paper discusses motivations for a distributed multimedia control framework for the arts, the qualities necessary for its success, the arts as an application domain for distributed multimedia research, and Kolo and Nebesko´s implementation.