VisitorsStudio turned the browser into a shared audiovisual performance space. Participants in different locations could upload sound, still images, animation and video, combine as many as eight layers in real time, chat and respond to one another through animated cursors.
The platform was developed at Furtherfield under the creative direction of Neil Jenkins, Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, with its interface and backend designed and programmed by Jenkins. It developed alongside FurtherStudio, initially giving residency audiences a studio in which they could become makers and performers themselves.
Designed to remain usable over a 56k modem, VisitorsStudio later used a modular Flash 8 client, Perl, MySQL and a socket server. It functioned simultaneously as artwork, production environment, social space and distributed broadcast infrastructure.
Public activity included Furthernoise performances, the five-day Dissension Convention protest jam during the 2004 Republican National Convention, international youth workshops, Game/Play and events at Watershed. VisitorsStudio received the Grand Net Art Prize from Art on the Net and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in 2009.
The surviving interface and documentation are preserved through web archives; its original database and network services are no longer live.