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Visit People's Park Plinth

Call 1 800 interact [2005]

06/06/2005
joachim

Spotlighted by Turbulence, Voicemosaic has a lot to do with the development of works such as Mark Napier’s and Andy Deck’s Graphic Jam (which is now down) or Olivier Auber’s Poietic Generator (still up and running.)
Btw, next appointment is from Friday the 10th of June until Saturday the 12th) and other interactive works. These works during the past few years have set what we can now quite basically call “web interfaces for interaction, used in an art context”.

Sounds of a chat room
Bringing together voice and image to build a visual mosaic of users chosen colours, Voicemosaic allows us to hear the voices of people dropping by and saying a few words (mostly in Portuguese, and English) to be part of the project. Surfing on Voicemosaic feels a bit like listening to an answering machine (“the truth is out there”, “o laaaa”, “don’t let your dreams be dreams” or people giggling and fooling around are the kind of things users can hear when clicking through the application). This kind of sound experiment could easily be associated to works created by artists such as Scanner, which were illegally recorded, cell phone conversations a few years ago.

Choose a color to give me call
The principle is quite simple, all you have to do is make a phone call (in US: (800) 289.5570 or (407) 386-2174), from any telephone device – mobile or not, then dial the PIN number 9991421055 when requested, drop a word or two, giggle or laugh. Then you go to the web site and listen to what you said by localising your message (by area or phone number), or simply listen to other people’s messages.

The application was developed in April 2004. It seemed quite slow and was not reacting as expected, this could have been a bad server day, who can tell? So, I can only inform you what I experienced at the time, and you might have better luck when visiting this piece yourselves. Most of the coloured squares did not seem to function at the time, when clicking on them often nothing actually happened. Although, they inked, connected to one another with 2 or 3 colored lines representing what seems to be the graphical, extensions of the participants’ voices belonging to the same geographical area. Expect the mosaic to change as time goes on, as people drop messages adding their coloured squares that they want to be represented by.

There are two interpretations we can make of this experiment. One of them would be that it causes time and space to collapse, it questions convergence and hybridisation between the telephone and the web, interaction, dualities and even biometrical data storage, as said in the presentation page of the work Voicemosaic. The other would be that sometimes interaction itself can be hard work.

On the one hand, one always feels like one is in a chat room experimenting these works, users always look at all the profiles to see if there is a neighbour posing nude in some outrageous underwear, search for my phone number, I’ll tell you who you are, locate me and I’ll lose you. Extend me on your website or I’ll no longer exist.

Voicemosaic shows a screen that maps participation as it arrives from several different geographical areas, in different languages and different times, and from this something is meant to be produced. Yet something is not working as well as it could, for it does not go all the way through the ‘time-space collapse’ sequence as announced. Instant messengers already function adequately in collapsing time/space. Media convergence and hybridisation between the telephone and the web, is something that needs to be and will be experienced on a more regular basis soon, but an answering machine relayed over the Internet does not seem to communicate work this way. On the whole, this is work has a lot of potential and it would be interesting to see the next steps after this. One could assume and enjoy this work as a beta-experiment and enjoy its context not because of what it is now but because of what it could be…