THROUGH the window of the studio control room at Arthouse in Dublin's Temple bar, an anxious crowd watches a row of faces all glowing with the same wretched stare of intense disbelieving concentration.
Inside this electronics-packed cell, Eamonn Hession, the man behind PaddyNet, Scott Blum, organiser of the Seattle Website iMusic, and Barry O'Neil of Arthouse are examining a small stack of slim black boxes on the desk in front of them.
All three are part of a team of editors, programmers, camera operators, nerds, cyberwarriors and information moguls trying to find the right buttons to press, the ones which will finally make the multimedia Internet art event, Digital Island, emerge from the deep waters of cyberspace.
Digital Island was instigated by the Irish Internet service, PaddyNet.
The service has operated a Website since last St Patrick's Day but yesterday marked the project's official launch with an experimental Internet festival. The idea was to encourage as many people as possible to use "net" technologies to communicate with Irish people around the world.
Throughout St Patrick's Day it was possible to log on to the company's World Wide Web site and explore anything from chat facilities to "digital postcards".
But highlight of the day was to be an event in which traditional Irish musicians in New York and Paris would use ISDN lines to play along with the Hothouse Flowers in a "cyber seisiun". The resulting music was then to be broadcast over the Internet.
But late last night, although shaky images of musicians appeared on Arthouse monitors and although the Flowers had played a typically emotive set, the three musical components of the evening had not yet come together.
Upstairs a little earlier in the evening, in the midst of pounding party noise, Blum, responsible for the Internet broadcasting element of the event, was chatting while modifying his Seattle Website on a spare terminal.
His iMusic site has a particularly apt logo for its St Patrick's Day collaboration. It shows an animated four-leaf clover with one leaf which wanders around the screen.
"If you look closely," says Blum, "you'll see that the fourth leaf never quite joins up with the others, but it always looks like it's going to..."