the late Remote Lounge

Remote Lounge - - East Village - New York Magazine Bar Guide

i had completely forgotten about this place which was, indeed, creepy, seldom artful and is now closed.

from a review in the NY Magazine Bar Guide: 

In theory, Remote Lounge is pretty cool: A high-tech wonderland of cameras and Cosmopolitans, in which the '50s-kitsch console at your table lets you spy on people throughout the bar, and contact other tables through the built-in telephone handset. In reality, however, Remote is an occasionally awkward theme bar, in which the attention-grabbing technology is the only thing to talk about, your neighbors aren’t worth spying on, and those Cosmos? At $10-12, a bit overpriced. Still, there are times—early evenings, Sundays, certain events—when Remote transforms into something otherworldly. You sit among the lights and monitors, catch flashes of color on the plasma screens, absorb some avant-garde DJs abstract beats, and wonder if this blissful cyber-scene will last forever. — Matt Gross

from a blog: http://www.synesthete.com/blog/2003/08

One of the attractions at the club are 50 cameras and remote control consoles. You can sit down at a console and with a joystick, control any of the cameras in the club. You have a monitor and a phone in addition to some other buttons to do things like take a snapshot that is put up on the web, send a message to a remote user, and talk with a remote user. It is pretty fun.

We watch the show for a while. It has been arranged by Repellent, a local zine and Micromusic, a user group based in Germany. The video content is being generated by two Amiga computers and run through a Edirol V4 mixer. We get John to give us a behind the scenes tour. The video cameras are all run into separate receiving units that are akin to channels at a Cable TV provider. They have 96 “channels,” which can be accessed with a VCR or similar device. A server is running the software to control the consoles, so it is fairly easy to update the whole system. They also have some custom systems to control various sets of monitors throughout the club. [from a 2003 blog]