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Send a Message
by
���Conor Barry
���Music Technology BSc, Queen’s University Belfast, 2012 ���
Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of Arts, Media Arts ���
School of Music, Theatre & Dance
University of Michigan ���
Ann Arbor, Michigan ���
April 25th, 2014
Approved by:
______________________________________________________ Assistant Professor Michael Gurevich, Thesis Director, Performing Arts Technology
______________________________________________________ Associate Professor Andrew Kirshner, Thesis Committee Member, Performing Arts Technology
______________________________________________________ Professor Stephen Rush, Thesis Committee Member, Performing Arts Technology
______________________________________________________ Assistant Professor Seth Ellis, Thesis Committee Member, School of Art and Design
Date Degree Conferred: May 2014
Table of Contents
List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... iii
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... v
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. vi
A Brief History of Telematic Art and Sound Art ............................................................ 1
I: From Telegraph to Radio ............................................................................................................. 1 II: Art at a Distance ......................................................................................................................... 10 III: Networked Artistic Collaboration ........................................................................................ 13 IV: Sound Art and Space ................................................................................................................ 15 V: Node Networks ............................................................................................................................ 24 VI: What Lies Ahead ........................................................................................................................ 33
Send a Message ...................................................................................................................... 35
I: Precursors and Origins of Send A Message .......................................................................... 35 i: Previous telematic performance work ............................................................................................ 35 ii: Previous Installation Work ................................................................................................................. 40 iii: North American Music ......................................................................................................................... 47
II: From Performance to Installation ........................................................................................ 50 III: Technical Details ...................................................................................................................... 57 Hardware ......................................................................................................................................................... 57 Software ............................................................................................................................................................ 60
IV: The Collaborative Process ...................................................................................................... 70
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 77
Collaboration on the Web ............................................................................................................ 77 Reflections upon Send a Message ............................................................................................. 80 Send a Message as a Commentary on Telematic Performance. ...................................... 86
Future Work ............................................................................................................................ 87
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 89
Appendix .................................................................................................................................. 94
ii
List of Figures Figure 1. Johnson, Ray. Mail Art & Ephemera ______________________________________________________________ 14 Figure 2. Nancy Lewis (left) from New York performing alongside a representation of Margaret Fisher
in San Francisco ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 25 Figure 3. People gather to experience Galloway and Rabinowitz' Hole in Space _________________________ 27 Figure 4. An early sketch for Leave a Message ______________________________________________________________ 43 Figure 5. Three sketches for prompts to be placed on the wall beside a telephone _______________________ 45 Figure 6. Details of time delays overlaid on the visualisation developed by Macklin Underdown for North
American Music _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 49 Figure 7. Schematic of the telephone handset converter circuit. A single AA battery acts as the power
source. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 58 Figure 8. An early telephone audio converter prototype ___________________________________________________ 59 Figure 9. The final audio converter unit _____________________________________________________________________ 59 Figure 10. An overview of components in the project. ______________________________________________________ 60 Figure 11. The final MaxMsp interface for the installation _________________________________________________ 62 Figure 12. Distance and Speed of Sound Delay Calculator _________________________________________________ 63 Figure 13. The playback mechanism for one location ______________________________________________________ 66 Figure 14. Violinist and composer Carolina Heredia performs in front of Macklin Underdown's
visualisation as part of North American Music _____________________________________________________________ 67 Figure 15. Initial mock-‐up of the visualisation for Send a Message ________________________________________ 68 Figure 16. An early sketch of the visualisation ______________________________________________________________ 69 Figure 17. The visualisation from Belfast's point of view ___________________________________________________ 70 Figure 18. The telephone holster designed by Ben Purdy ___________________________________________________ 76 Figure 19. The Belfast telephone installation _______________________________________________________________ 78
iii
Acknowledgements
This thesis project would not have been possible without the following
collaborators:
John D’Arcy, Daniel Buckley, Morten Marius Apenes, Grete Årbu, Ben Purdy, Nota
Tsekoura, Cory Levinson, Glaute Fleisje, Olan Stephens, Michael Speers, and Lugh
O’Neill.
Thank you all for your engagement, enthusiasm, patience, and creativity.
Thanks to Macklin Underdown, not just for the web-design expertise within
this project, but also as a sounding board for ideas, and more importantly your
generous friendship over the last two years.
To Michael Gurevich for your guidance and expertise throughout my education in
Belfast and Michigan. Beyond your assistance as my thesis director, you have
influenced my education more than anyone and set me on a confident path for
future research.
To my thesis committee members Stephen Rush, Seth Ellis, and Andy Kirshner for
their articulate feedback and productive criticism.
iv
I am grateful for the unconditional support from my family into my bizarre
endeavours into music technology. Some day I will be able to explain what I do. A
heartfelt thanks to Rachel as we embark on another culturally confused adventure
to the west coast.
To Sile O’Modhrain for her mentorship, and Jason Corey alongside the PAT faculty
as a whole for enabling the life changing experience of studying at the University of
Michigan.
To Simon Alexander-Adams and Eric Sheffield, your friendship and immense
creativity alongside the wider PAT community are the reasons I woke up each day
with excitement and purpose to discover what we could make next.
To Linda Knox and Eleanor Schmitt for making somewhere like Design Lab 1 exist.
To Sile’s Lab crew especially Esthir Lemi for her support in finding collaborators for
this project.
Dave Schroeder for the Inst-Int experience. Felipe Hickmann, Gascia Ouzounian,
Paul Stapleton and those from SARC.
To Ann Arbor, Belfast, and Dublin. It is wonderful to have many places that one
can call home.
v
Abstract
Send a Message is a telematic sound-art installation, featuring 8
telephones located in various cities in the United States and Europe. The
microphone feeds from each location are transmitted to the other telephones at
the speed of sound. The work was developed through the lens of telematic music
performance, the practice of performing live from separate geographical
locations via telecommunications. A primary concern of telematic music
practitioners is the loss of tangible presence and connectedness between
performers and audience members. While Send a Message does not attempt to
rectify these issues for performance purposes, it uses them as a starting point to
explore what it means to be connected to and communicate with other humans
who are located in distant places. Through re-inserting the speed of sound into
long distance communications, all of the participants can exist in their unique
geographical locations whilst still being a part of a shared acoustic environment.
The written component to this thesis provides a historical review of telematics
and sound art, as well as an overview of the origins and process behind Send a
Message.
vi
Introduction
In November 2010, I was in the audience of a telematic performance at the
Sonic Lab in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Telematic performance is the term used for
live performances that feature (most commonly) musicians located in separate
geographic locations. Performers can be heard in all participating locations near-
simultaneously via the use of high-speed Internet. As an undergraduate student at
the Sonic Arts Research Centre, I had attended many such concerts and often found
myself disillusioned by the work of my peers within the medium. Arriving early, I
witnessed the concert organisers in panic as the network link with one of the
locations had failed. To the right of my aisle seat, a projection screen turned on and
a row of chairs appeared beside me, displaying an audience trickling in to take
their seats. As a life-sized figure on screen took their seat beside me, I chanced a
wave to a camera and quickly received a wave back. “How are you?” I asked.
“Good, good. Very cold” a German accent replied. As the finishing touches were
being applied on stage, I sat with Belfast to the left of me, and Hamburg on the
right - a seamless portal that allowed me to interact with those on either side. I do
not remember anything about the concert itself other than the shared experience I
had with the other audiences from afar. We shared grimaces at feedback,
occasionally made awkward eye contact, gave appreciation to soloists, and
exchanged farewells at the end, as if leaving a new friend at a bus stop.
vii
It was the first time I realised the real potential within telematic
performance. For me that potential laid not solely within the ability to perform with
others from long distance, but rather the opportunity to create shared experiences
with others in performance settings. For once the dissatisfying disconnect that is rife
within telematic performance was cured through connecting the audience, rather
than focusing on the performers.
Felipe Hickmann, one of the co-ordinators of the concert in question,
NetCoMeDia,1 subsequently explained how the audience screens were carefully
considered. It took three days for them to align the projectors on either side of the
audience in order to achieve the natural line of sight between the venues. The
result of this attention to detail inspired me to delve into telematic performance
myself and explore more lateral approaches to Internet-based music performance.
During my first year at the University of Michigan, I was a member of the Digital
Music Ensemble, whose focus in 2012 was on network performance. The creative
atmosphere within this class led to the fruition of a number of performances that
took novel approaches to the practice.
My interest in sound-based installation art has also flourished during my
time at the University of Michigan. Inspired by the work of my peers, and the
accessibility of platforms such as Arduino, Processing, MaxMsp, and
OpenFrameworks, I began to explore the medium under the guidance of Michael
Gurevich and Sile O’Modhrain. Installations such as Leave a Message, Message
1 Queens University Belfast, “Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music
viii
Box, and Katie Don’t Go explored my curiosity with the powerful and profound
nature of simple, brief, spoken messages when they are placed in a particular time
and space for anyone to digest.
This thesis combines these two threads of my work, as I begin to refine what
I see now as an area to which I wish to devote future research. I believe we can
improve the nature of long distance collaboration, communication, and creative
practice through reinstating the tangible aspects of geography and physical space in
an attempt to prevent the fragmentation of one’s presence on the network. I see
Send a Message as the first of a series that begins to address this issue by exploring
how using the natural speed of sound as the pace of transmission can allow
participants to contribute to the network from their unique geographical locations.
It provides insights into the nature of instant communication, the manner in which
we interact over long distances, and the true scale of our planet as our messages
travel across the globe at their ‘true’ pace.
1
A Brief History of Telematic Art and Sound Art
“Telematics enables tremendous artistic freedom. It permits the artist to liberate art
from its conventional embodiment in a physical object located in a unique
geographic location. Telematics provides a context for interactive aesthetic
encounters and facilitates artistic collaborations among globally dispersed
individuals.” Edward A. Shanken 2
I: From Telegraph to Radio
There are various terms for the practice of connecting performers and artists
from distant locations for live performance. For performing live music via
communications, terms include telematic performance, networked performance,
tele-‐music, remote music, multi-‐location performance, remote performance, net-‐
music and a plethora of other arrangements.
In this thesis, I will refer to telematics; the combination of computers and
telecommunications.
The practice of performing music telematically between distant locations has
become a primary research focus for music technologists in the last 10 or so years.
Numerous experimental performances have explored the medium’s potential to
achieve telepresence, the sensation of being elsewhere through the means of
2 Edward A. Shanken, introduction to Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Univ of California Press, 2003), 53.
2
communications technology. While the newfound capabilities of the Internet
provide an exciting frontier for live music performance, the relationship between
music and communications dates back much further, as far as the 1870s. The idea of
telepresence can be dated back to the earliest telephone concerts from the late
1800s, where listeners could have the illusion of being present within the audience
of a distant concert hall. Communications technology can also create virtual
environments. Rather than teleporting one’s presence to a distant location, users
can exist within a vast web of interconnected nodes, the combination of which are
capable of supporting an environmental structure of their own. Such a system was
first explored in Max Neuhaus’ Public Supply, which we will discuss in detail later in
this paper.
The term télématique first appeared in a brief report entitled “L’Informatisation de
la Société” written in 1978 by Simon Nora and Alain Minc.3 The document is a report
to French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing concerning France’s technological
sovereignty amidst the introduction of computer network systems by IBM. They
describe telematics as the “springing to life born of the marriage between
computers and communications networks, which culminate in the arrival of
universal satellites, transmitting images, data and sounds.”4 The document is an
echo of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic descriptions of an electronic network that
serves as an extension of humankind. While McLuhan’s vision of a global village lays
3 Simon Nora and Alain Minc, L’informatisation de la société: rapport à M. le Président de la République (Seuil, 1978). 4 Ibid., 13.
3
promise to an idealistic integrated community,5 15 years later, Nora and Minc look
upon the now realised capabilities of telematics and see similar potential, but also
express concern as to how IBM could monopolise the infrastructure, and perhaps
prohibit such a decentralised network. The implications of how distributed
networks may develop, Nora and Minc argue, depends greatly upon the manner in
which the French people and society choose to use the medium.
The concept of transmitting music across long distances has existed as long
as telephony itself. Before the invention of the telegram, experiments into the
electronic transfer of the human voice were already well underway. Charles
Wheatstone, the English inventor responsible for the concertina and spectroscope,
published a paper in 1831 describing his telephonic experiments. Amongst his
suggestions to overcome the limitations of transmitting sound was to develop an
artificial voice that could reproduce the spoken message more clearly than wired
transmission would allow. Using the term “telephone” he proposed plans for a route
of solid rods from Edinburgh to London that would allow the transmission of voice
and music.6
The invention of the telegraph in 1844 saw the first time a message travelled
faster than the messenger. Plans for telegraph-‐like devices can be traced more than
5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT press, 1994). 6 Daniel P. McVeigh, “‘An Early History of the Telephone 1664-1865’,,” Electronic Publication, with the Help of Jean Gagnon, Daniel Langlois Foundation, and Don Foresta, MARCEL, 2000.
4
90 years previous as an anonymous writer (thought to be Charles Morrison)
suggested the use of one wire per letter of the alphabet as a mechanism for sending
messages over long distances. An electrified ball on the receiving end would attract
a piece of paper representing the letter to rise into the interpreter’s view. 7 In 1774
a similar system developed by Georges Louis Lesage was capable of transferring
messages between rooms. 8 A more extreme use of electricity to transfer messages
included Salvá y Campillo’s suggestion for each alphabetised wire to send an electric
shock to a human that would in turn shout their assigned letter to an interpreter.
Five years later, Campillo retracted this torturous form of communication in favour
of using frogs’ legs to spasm upon electrocution as the signifier.9
In the mid 19th Century, the single wire, Morse-‐coded telegram platform was
quickly adopted, with over 50 telegraph companies operating in the United States
by 1851. 10 During the year of its invention, a chess game between players in
Washington and Baltimore exhibited the range of uses the new communication
device could offer. 11
In 1874, Elisha Gray during his experiments into telephone transmission
used oscillators to reproduce sounds transmitted from a microphone. In one of the
earliest electronic musical instruments created, he built a bank of eight oscillators
7 “Electric Telegraph,” accessed April 9, 2014, http://www.rochelleforrester.ac.nz/electric-telegraph.html. 8 “CABINET // The Human Telegraph,” accessed April 9, 2014, http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/21/sanchez.php. 9 Ibid. 10 “HistoryWired: History of the Telegraph,” accessed April 14, 2014, http://www.historywired.si.edu/detail.cfm?ID=324. 11 “NMSAT Vol. 1+2 — PART 1 : ∞ - 1964 — Ancient and Modern History, Anticipatory Literature and Technical Developments References,” April 2011, 607.
5
that could be controlled with a two-‐octave keyboard. An announcement from a
concert from Highland Park in Chicago on Dec 29th 1874 stated:
“… [A] unique and extraordinary feature will be the first public exhibition of
Elisha Gray’s Electric Telephone, by means of which, a number of familiar
melodies, transmitted from a distance, through telegraphic wire, will be
received upon violins and other instruments, within the room.”12
Gray toured the United States, exhibiting his Harmonic Telegraph and went on to
produce some of the first electronic music concerts using similar devices.13 From the
earliest experiments into telegraphy, long-‐distance communications and music have
been inextricably linked. Indeed from the pioneering era of communications from
the 19th Century right through to the experiments at Bell Telephone’s laboratories in
the 1950s, the duality between music and communications exemplifies the desires
of many to distribute and perform music between distant locations.
As telephone technology developed, long before the creation of radio, the
potential for music to be heard and performed in separate locations was quickly
becoming a reality. The first mention of what we now interpret as a telematic
concert appears in an address French novelist Jules Verne gave in the city of Amiens.
Une Ville Ideal took a satirical edge on the state of Amiens at the time it was given in
1875, but also an insight into what the town might be like in the year 2000. A
passage from a transcript of his speech describes an “electric concert” happening in
Amiens, London, Vienna, Rome, St. Petersburg, and Beijing simultaneously. Verne 12 Ibid., 727. 13 Ibid., 730–731.
6
colourfully describes how the fictional “ivory crusher” of the future plays a note and
the remote pianos replicate the sound from their keyboards.14
A year later in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke what are commonly
acknowledged as the first words transferred by telephone. 12 days after Bell’s first
successful test, The New York Times predicted bright things for the new technology:
“The telephone – for that is the name of the new instrument – is intended to
convey sounds from one place to another over the ordinary telegraph-‐wires, and it
can be used to transmit either the uproar of a Wagnerian orchestra or the gentle
cooing of a female lecturer. … When Mme. TITIENS is singing, or Mr. THOMAS’
orchestra is playing, or a champion orator is apostrophizing the American eagle, a
telephone, placed in the building where such sounds are in process of production,
will convey them over the telegraph-‐wires to the remotest corners of the earth. …
No man who can sit in his own study with his telephone by his side, and thus listen
to the performance of an opera at the Academy, will care to go to Fourteenth street
and to spend the evening in a hot anti crowded building.”15
Four months later, Bell played Yankee Doodle on a parlour organ in Boston,
where afterward a New York based operator replied by telegraph the name of the
tune to validate its transmission.16
14 Jules Venre, “Une Ville Ideal,” accessed March 25, 2014, http://jv.gilead.org.il/zydorczak/ideal-pl.html. 15 “‘The Telephone’, New York Times,” 8. 16 Catherine MacKenzie, Alexander Graham Bell - The Man Who Contracted Space (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1928).
7
From 1877, the same year as the introduction of the colour organ and the
player piano, telephone concerts grew in popularity. The first long distance
telephone concert featured Frederick Boskovitz performing from Philadelphia,
where a sold out Steinway Hall in New York received the piano solo via Elisha Gray’s
Harmonic Telegraph, which is interestingly noted by the Daily Graphic “is applicable
alone to the transmission of instrumental music. Professor Bell of Boston is the
inventor of the apparatus for transmitting the tones of the voice.”17
Over the next decade, many telephone concerts were arranged across the
United States to exhibit the potential of the remarkable technology. As
philanthropists purchased telephones to transmit the opera to their bedsides,18
more entrepreneurial minds saw the monetary potential of broadcasting theatre to
the public. Clément Ader had 80 telephone transmitters placed across the stage of
the Paris Opera, where in various hotels, cafés and other venues listeners could pay
50 centimes for five minutes air-‐time via “Théâtrophones”. These devices also
featured the first two-‐channel stereophonic playback mechanism, as a pair of
headphones was used to receive what Ader called “binauriclar auduition.” This
unique approach to replicate the true theatrical experience allowed listeners to
17 “NMSAT Vol. 1+2 — PART 1 : ∞ - 1964 — Ancient and Modern History, Anticipatory Literature and Technical Developments References,” 756. 18 Edward Fry, an avid Opera goer had the Academy of Music in New York transmitted to his bed as he occasionally joined in the applause. Armstrong, W.G. (1884). “A Record of the Opera Philadelphia”. (pp. 174-176). Philadelphia : Porter & Coates.
8
follow the movements of performers and gain a sense of depth in such a manner
that the Théâtrophones were a popular success until the advent of radio.19
Before the 1920s, there was no method of amplifying electrical signals,
meaning telephone users had to place the receivers next to their ears. In the late
1890s, Thaddeus Cahill, an American inventor, sought a way to broadcast music via
telephone lines and be reproduced loud enough for an audience of listeners to hear.
Rather than broadcasting musical performances much like the Théâtrophone,
Cahill’s experiments into the use of electric motors and induction coils to create
synthesised tones resulted in the transmission of loud, audible signals via telephone
lines. Featuring 35 long rheotomes (much less that the 408 his patent originally
described), magnetic coils induced electrical current based on the proximity of
raised bumps in the cylinders. A cylinder’s rotation speed corresponded to the
fundamental audible frequency, with each additional bump on the circumference of
the tube raising the pitch an octave. Seven sections of each cylinder provided a
seven-‐octave range for each note value, with 12 cylinders creating a chromatic scale.
Manipulating the distance of the coils from the cylinders could create dynamics. The
first public concert of Cahill’s “Telharmonium” in 1902 featured a gramophone-‐like
amplification cone around the telephone’s receiver where the audience located
“many miles away” heard the 7 tonne prototype performed from Cahill’s factory.20
Cahill later offered telephone subscriptions to hotels, museums, casinos and wealthy
individuals who desired to have the Telharmonium’s “Muzak”-‐like services piped to
19 “NMSAT Vol. 1+2 — PART 1 : ∞ - 1964 — Ancient and Modern History, Anticipatory Literature and Technical Developments References,” 837. 20 Ibid., 795.
9
their telephones. The synthesiser, similar in structure to a pipe organ, was a pre-‐
cursor to the electric Hammond organ, which benefitted from the amplification of
electrical signals, greatly reducing the physical form factor the Telharmonium
required.21
Wireless telegraphy technologies developed in the 1880s and 1890s paved
the way for what we now know as AM radio. Reginald Fessenden made the first
wireless audio transmissions in 1900 and six years later, the first broadcasts of
music on December 24th, 1906 with a rendition of O Holy Night. Early radio
experiments focused on two-‐way transmission for communication purposes, rather
than the one-‐way broadcasts we associate the medium with today. Initially
developed with marine communication in mind, many of the early demonstrations
of radio’s capabilities occurred in Navy shipyards. Lee de Forest, one of radio’s
foremost innovators (and also quite fond of music in his spare time), was
performing tests of wireless telephone sets for the US Navy, using phonograph
records as the source material. According to his personal account:
“Much to my surprise, many wireless amateurs and professional operators
intercepted and enjoyed these test transmissions. They came to look for these
‘programs.’ And quite naturally, the idea of mass communication occurred to me,
whereby attractive music and interesting talks might be placed on the air, thus
21 “Journal of Australasian Theatre Organ Studies - First Unit Organ,” accessed April 9, 2014, http://theatreorgans.com/southerncross/Journal/Centenary%20of%20the%20Electronic%20Organ.htm.
10
creating profitable demand for wireless equipment by those desirous of listening
in.”22
At the time of these radio experiments, De Forest listed another feature of the
radiotelephone upon ships; the provision of “music and other forms of
entertainment to passengers travelling on the passenger vessels.”23
II: Art at a Distance
From 1909, radio technology established itself within naval operations as a
two-‐way communication system, and the one-‐way broadcast format flourished as an
entertainment format for the public throughout the 20th century.
Radio offered a medium capable of stretching across landmasses supplying
rich and diverse content. Four decades previous to McLuhan’s prophetic
descriptions of a global village, Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov saw radio as a
platform that could have far reaching consequences for creating a worldwide
community. Chlebnikov’s document “The Radio of the Future” from 1921, describes
how waves of “human knowledge will roll across the entire country into each local
Radio station, to be projected that very day as letters onto the dark pages of
enormous books, higher than houses, that stand in the center of each town, slowly
22 "The Story of Lee de Forest," Electrical Experimenter, December, 1916, p 561 quoted in “ - “NMSAT Vol. 1+2 — PART 1 : ∞ - 1964 — Ancient and Modern History, Anticipatory Literature and Technical Developments References,” 1025.
23 De Forest Music on Shipboard to Entertain Passengers," Electrical World, January, 1907 quoted in Ibid.
11
turning their own pages…. These books of the streets will be known as Radio
Reading-‐Walls!” 24 Chlebnikov also predicted remote art exhibits where paintings
from capital cities could be displayed in the small towns -‐ annihilating distance.
While highlighting the potential for a networked web, capable of point-‐to-‐point
communication, “The Radio of the Future” shows how the established format of one-‐
way transmission could lead to a centralised propaganda tool, where “the shortest
interruption of the transmission of the (main) Radio (station) will cause a mental
crisis of the whole country, (and) will cause a timely loss of consciousness.” 25
The concerns were reinforced by Bertolt Brecht’s 1932 essay “The Radio as
an Apparatus of Communication.” Brecht suggests a reversion from Radio as a tool
of distribution to a form of communication:
“The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public
life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as
well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him
into a relationship instead of isolating him.” 26
While radio would play a central role in the development of sound art
practice in the 20th century, the promise of a communicative network that allowed
one to create or collaborate without being physically present raised questions for
the future of art. As these questions were being asked, new media theorists were
also pondering the authenticity of an art object that is a reproduction of the original.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter
24 Ibid., 1163. 25 Ibid. 26 Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” Brecht on Theatre, 1932, 51–53.
12
Benjamin suggested that there is a depreciation in the “aura” of an art object once it
has been reproduced.27 John Dewey’s “Art as Experience” states, “When artistic
objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a
wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance,
with which esthetic theory deals.” 28 Just as a phonograph is one step removed from
the musician, communications enabled the original artist to be one step removed
from their work.
One of the earliest explicit uses of communications in the generation of a new
artwork was Lázló Moholy-‐Nagy’s Telephone Paintings. According to the artist:
“In 1922, I ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings in
porcelain enamel. I had the factory’s colour chart before me and I sketched my
paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone the factory supervisor
had the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took down the dictated shapes
in the correct position.” 29
In a fitting tribute to the compromises that are unfortunately often inherent
to the practice of telematic art, whether Moholy-‐Nagy actually used the telephone at
all in this instance is still a matter of debate.30 31 Regardless of whether Moholy-‐
27 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin UK, 2008). 1936 28 John Dewey, “Art as Experience [1934],” ALA Booklist 30 (1980): 272. 29 L. Maholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), 79. 30 Krisztina Passuth, “Kisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), P. 33.” (New York: Thames and Hudson,, 1985). 31 Eduardo Kac, “Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications,” in International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques: ACM SIGGRAPH
13
Nagy did indeed use a telephone or not, the question of ownership and physical
presence surrounding an artwork created via communications had been raised.
III: Networked Artistic Collaboration
The potential of a de-‐centralised communication network for the purposes of
artistic practice outlined by Bertolt Brecht initially found its roots not through
wireless transmission but “Mail art.” In the late 1950s and early 1960s Ray Johnson
began experimenting with Mail Art as a platform to collaborate remotely with other
artists in a non-‐traditional format.
92 Visual Proceedings, vol. 1992, 1992, 47–57, http://telematic.walkerart.org/telereal/kac_kac.html.
14
Figure 1. Johnson, Ray. Mail Art & Ephemera 32
A group of experimental artists grew from the practice, named “The New
York Correspondance School” (sic), exchanging drawings and collages often using
the Surrealist exquisite corpse technique to examine the potential of the medium.
The practice extended beyond international borders, reaching artists in remote
areas in other continents. Prior to the formalisation of the Fluxus movement,
George Brecht, an American artist famous for his Event Scores, used the postal
service network to share event scores to friends.33 Image and text-‐based long
distance artistic collaborations evolved alongside developments in technology such
32 “From Ray Johnson - Mail Art & Ephemera - Art - Ray Johnson Estate,” accessed April 9, 2014, http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/art/from-ray-johnson/works/3/. 33 Ascott, Telematic Embrace, 56.
15
as fax machines and satellite networks. The 1983 work, La Plissure du Texte further
explored the nature of what its creator Roy Ascott called “distributed authorship.”34
Made possible through a dedicated networking service for a collection of artists
called ARTBOX, La Plissure du Texte featured 11 contributing authors from around
the world to create a tri-‐lingual fairy tale narrative, interspersed with poetry, ASCII
art, and the occasional technical assistance request.35
The Internet as we know it today is replete with artistic collaborations, yet
the familiar format of send-‐wait-‐receive akin to Mail Art is still the primary method
of generating creative works across long distances via e-‐mail, forums, cloud based
storage or asynchronous online discussion. As in-‐browser real-‐time collaborative
platforms begin to appear and mature, concurrent online collaboration will soon
become another tool available to a new generation of artists. Further examples of
early satellite and networked based real-‐time collaborative experiments will be
reviewed later in this paper.
IV: Sound Art and Space
Telematic performance and networked sound art raise new questions
regarding the relationships between sound and space. Early experiments into
34 Edward A. Shanken, introduction to Roy Ascott, “Art and Telematics: Towards a Network Consciousness,” ) Telematic Embrace-Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, London, Univeristy of California Press Berkley and Los Angeles, California, 1984, 186–200. 35 Ascott, “La Plissure Du Texte,” n.d. The full transcript is worth a look through. Available from http://alien.mur.at/rax/ARTEX/PLISSURE/plissure.html
16
spatialisation allowed composers to shape sound in physical space much like a
sculptor would shape clay with her hands. This newfound plasticity of sound
motivated a generation of artists to explore the relationship between sound and
architecture through the form of sound-‐art installations. Experiments into
telecommunications within sound art through projects such as Maryanne Amacher’s
City Links and Max Neuhaus’ Public Supply extend this interaction of sound and
architecture beyond a single acoustic space, resulting in spatialisation on a
potentially global scale. To understand the importance of sound art practice and its
relationship to telematics, we must look to its origins, from the turn of the 20th
century.
The Futurist manifesto “The Art of Noise” is commonly referred to as the
founding document of noise-‐art, an origin point of sound art and sound installation.
Luigi Russolo’s “Intonarumori” brought the sounds of his newly industrialised
surroundings into the context of music performance. Machinery introduced an
entirely new sonic palette to the human ear that over the next century would slowly
infiltrate the concert hall. It was the arrival of magnetic tape recording in the late
1940s that would provide the catalyst for sound art. Musical time could be
translated to the physical length of tape, and the affordable medium was also
malleable enough for composers to experiment with cutting and splicing sections
together.
Finding its origins in the Radiodiffusion Française studios in Paris, Pierre
Schaeffer’s “Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète” embraced the introduction
of tape within their compositional experiments. Under the instruction of Schaeffer,
17
Jaques Poullin developed the “Pupitre d’Espace” in 1951, the first multichannel
audio device designed to spatialise audio.36 Four tracks of tape were pre-‐assigned to
determined speaker outputs, with one track capable of being spatialised in real time
by manipulating a hand held transmitter coil positioned between four larger
receiver coils arranged to reflect the position of the speakers. 37
Three decades previous to Poullin’s invention, Edgar Varèse composed
Intégrales, which according to a lecture he presented in 1939 was “… conceived for a
spatial projection. I constructed the work to employ certain acoustical means which
did not yet exist, but which I knew could be realized and would be used sooner or
later.”38 It wasn’t until 1954 that Varèse had the opportunity to present a spatialised
work. Déserts featuring 2-‐channel tape, 14 wind instruments, 5 percussionists, and
piano was presented as part of a more conservative music programme at the
Théâtre des Champs-‐Élysées. The spatialisation was only apparent to those listening
at home however, as the first stereophonic radio broadcast. In conjunction with
Radio France, two audio feeds were transmitted on separate radio frequencies.
Listeners had to gather a pair of receivers tuned to these frequencies to experience
the piece.39
36 Georgina Born, Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 75. 37 Daniel Teruggi, “‘Technology and Musique Concrete: The Technical Developments of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and Their Implication in Musical Composition’.,” Organised Sound 12, no. 3 (2007): 213–231. 38 John Strawn, “The Intégrales of Edgard Varèse Space, Mass, Element, and Form,” Perspectives of New Music 17, no. 1 (October 1, 1978): 139. 39 Gascia Ouzounian, “Sound Art and Spatial Practices : Situating Sound Installation Art since 1958,” January 1, 2008, 58.
18
Across the Atlantic, the American Project for Music for Magnetic Tape
pioneered the use spatial audio in composition. Between 1952 and 1954 the seminal
works of William’s Mix by John Cage, Intersection I by Morton Feldman, and Octet by
Earle Brown all experimented with octophonic spatialisation. Practitioners from the
Elektronische Musik school were also delving into spatial audio, most notably
Karlheinz Stockhausen with Gesang Der Junglinge. Taking a serial compositional
approach to spatialisation, Stockhausen arranged sounds to travel around audience
in clockwise and counter-‐clockwise movement. Originally composed for five
channels, the technology was not available for the piece to be presented at its 1956
premier in more than 4 channels, so a separate tape player was situated on centre
stage.40
As developments in spatialisation within music began to mature, the practice
of placing sounds in space led to more thorough consideration of architecture and
the influence of the acoustic environment upon the listener’s experience of music.
Site-‐specific musical concerts began to appear and experimental composers began
to not only present sounds in space, but also experiment with representation of
dislocated spaces outside of the concert hall within their compositions.
Poème Électronique, the iconic large-‐scale multimedia work by Edgar Varèse,
broke ground on the frontiers of site-‐specific sound installation and audio
spatialisation. As part of the 1958 Brussels World Faire, acclaimed architect Le
Corbusier was commissioned to design a space that would showcase Philips 40 Smalley, “Gesang Der Jünglinge,” 10 – 11.
19
Corporation’s technological advancements. Le Corbusier alongside architect-‐
composer Iannis Xenakis created a structure made from a series of extruded
hyperbolic paraboloids containing multiple projectors, controllable lights, and
between 300 and 425 loudspeakers. 41 Now that Varèse had the tools he desired to
create spatialised compositions, he used the new technology to its fullest extent in
the eight-‐minute composition. Nine separate channels of spatialised audio were
achievable with the advanced multi-‐track tape system developed specifically for this
work. The musique concrète composition realised Varèse’s long held ambition to
create truly spatialised music in a way that both engulfs and surrounds the listener.
Sound as an acoustic phenomenon relies on space for its manifestation. The
new capabilities of spatialisation gave composers a newfound capability to greater
sculpt a sound in space, enhancing its ability to interact with architecture, and
allowing listeners to determine their listening experience through movement, thus
interacting with the piece. Designed as an 8-‐minute loop, Poème Électronique
allowed visitors to move freely throughout the space, the spatialised audio giving
each individual a unique sonic experience. As the work of Varèse and others moved
toward locating sound in space rather than time, sound installation, as Max Neuhaus
would describe it in the late 1960s, had become a reality.
While the origins of sound installation are derived from the found sound
practices of Cage and Schaeffer in the 1940s and the earlier noise-‐art practices of
the futurists, The “Networked Music and Sound Art Timeline” database edited by
Jérôme Joy justly includes a description of St. Mark’s basilica from 1525 near the
41 The number of speakers varies widely between sources. See Ouzounian, “Sound Art and Spatial Practices,” 60.
20
beginning of its timeline. 42 The unique acoustic features of the church allowed
composers to experiment with echoes and reverberation in their compositions. By
situating choirs in multiple locations around the church, composers exploited these
acoustics to create some of the earliest spatialised works that deliberately enacted
the architecture of the space into their compositions. Site specificity is an essential
component of sound installation as a medium, due to its symbiotic relationship with
architecture.
The works that established the medium of sound installation as an
identifiable practice by Max Neuhaus incited “an integration of the visual and sonic
arts.”43 The earlier found sound compositional practices took everyday sounds and
presented them in a musical format. In contrast, early examples of sound
installation took sound and placed it geographically in order for them to be found.
Neuhaus established himself early in life as a prominent contemporary music
performer and percussionist. His lateral approach to interpreting musical sound is
exemplified by his sound work LISTEN. In his own words:
“I began my career as a musician working in a sphere of music where
distinctions between composer and performer were beginning to disappear. I
became interested in going further and moving into an area where composer and
performer would not exist.” 44
42 “NMSAT Vol. 1+2 — PART 1 : ∞ - 1964 — Ancient and Modern History, Anticipatory Literature and Technical Developments References,” 282. 43 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum, 2006), 151. 44 Alain Cueff, “Max Neuhaus: The Space of Sound,” Artscribe International 71 (October 1988): 66–67.
21
Neuhaus’ first sound installation Drive In Music featured seven radio
transmitters transmitting on different frequencies located alongside a half-‐mile
stretch of road in Buffalo, New York. The experience one had of the installation
depended on their choice of radio frequency, direction of travel, speed, and even the
weather. The driver’s experience of the artwork is manifested through their actions.
Neuhaus would take user participation in his work one step further with
Public Supply in 1966.
“By mixing calls – listeners’ sounds and noises, feedbacks – coming in to ten
telephones, Max Neuhaus combined a radio station with the telephone network and
created a two-‐way public aural space twenty miles in diameter encompassing New
York City where any inhabitant could join a live dialogue with sound by making a
telephone call. Using technology he had constructed himself, he was able to mix calls
coming in to ten telephones in the studios of the WBAI radio station in New York in
different ways and then broadcast this melange of listeners’ sounds and noises.
Once the listeners who called in had switched their radios on, he played with the
feedback this produced and bundled sounds from introverted and extroverted
callers together.”45
As composers such as Cage and Stockhausen experimented with telephones
and radios within live performance and compositions, Neuhaus’ Public Supply
changed what an interactive work of sound art could be. In his accounts of the work,
he explains how the combination of telephones, “a two-‐way virtual space in the
aural dimension,” and broadcast radio created “a virtual aural space in which a large
45 Jérôme Joy, ed., “NMSAT Vol. 3+4+5,” April 2011, 89.
22
number of people can be at the same time.”46 Within this experimental artwork,
Neuhaus expanded sound installation’s relationship with its surrounding
architecture and environment, so that sound could exist in multiple dislocated yet
connected acoustic environments.
He would further develop this concept with Radio Net in 1977. In this
iteration, Neuhaus created what he described as “a sound-‐transformation ‘box’ that
was literally fifteen hundred miles wide by three thousand miles long with five ins
and outs emerging in Washington.”47
From 1967 to 1980, prolific sound artist Maryanne Amacher used similar
techniques to Neuhaus in relocating sounds to distant places via communications.
Rather than using listener submissions as source material, she coupled separate
physical environments by piping the ambient sound of a location to another. Of her
work, she noted how “the sound was alive and it came through high quality
telephone lines – people always thought I was playing a cassette. It was just hard for
them to realize at that time that this was actually live sound.”48 Amacher’s works re-‐
integrate the relationship between architecture and sound, with each room in her
exhibition City Links #1-‐22 (1967) providing a different soundscape being
transported in from afar. Amacher describes:
46 Max Neuhaus and SOUND DESIGN, “The Broadcast Works and Audium,” in Zeitgleich: The Symposium, the Seminar, the Exhibition, 1994, http://www.max-neuhaus.info/audio-video/Broadcast_Works_and_Audium.pdf. 47 Ibid. 48 Joy, “NMSAT Vol. 3+4+5,” 94.
23
“An entire building or series of rooms provides a stage for the sonic and
visual sets of my installations. Architecture especially articulates sonic imaging in
‘structure-‐bourne’ sound, magnifying color and spatial presence as the sound
shapes interact with structural characteristics of the rooms before reaching the
listener.”49
The capability of communications to transpose locations, people, and sound
making objects to other places led to many conceptual artworks that further
explored the necessity of the artist to be physically present in the formation of their
artwork. An exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art entitled Art by
Telephone paid tribute to Moholy-‐Nagy’s Telephone Pictures. Artists relayed
instructions via telephone to gallery attendants who had to realise their
descriptions of their artworks, without “verbal exchange, drawings, blueprints or
written documents.”50 While arguably, the telephone was mostly used in these
instances as a substitute for written notes or present verbal communication and
thus did not fully explore the attributes unique to the medium, the dedicated
exhibition featured works that connected attendants to distant strangers51, and also
the artists themselves.52
49 Maryanne Amacher, liner notes from ‘Sound Characters’, New York Tzadik Records,1998 found in LaBelle, Background Noise, 172. 50 “UbuWeb Sound :: Art By Telephone,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://www.ubu.com/sound/art_by_telephone.html. 51 Robert Hout’s contribution featured 26 telephone numbers, linked to the letters of the alphabet. A person namerd ‘Arthur’ with the appropriate alphabetical surname was chosen from cities beginning with the same letter (e.g. Arthur Bacon from Baltimore). Gallery attendees were then asked to call the number and ask for ‘Art’. Adriana de Souzae Silva, “Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces,” Leonardo Music Journal 12, no. 10 (October 2004).
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V: Node Networks
The 1970s saw the advent of computer networks and the formation of
Internet protocols (IP) that are still in use today. The first transmission of audio via
IP took place between the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in August 1974.53 While this technology would require more
time to develop in order to perform bi-‐directional real-‐time transmission, satellite
technology was already capable of this across long distances. However the
prohibitively high cost of satellite communications inhibited its use by experimental
artists and was primarily reserved for wide-‐scale television broadcasts.
Understanding the potential of satellite transmission, two separate groups of artists
in the United States led independent projects in the hope of using the medium for
simultaneous interactive trans-‐continental collaborations.
52 Dennis Oppenheim had the museum call him once a week to ask his weight. Ascott, Telematic Embrace, 58. 53 “RTP: Historical Notes,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/history.html.
25
Figure 2. Nancy Lewis (left) from New York performing alongside a representation of
Margaret Fisher in San Francisco54
Send/Receive Satellite Network was a project led by Liza Bear and Keith
Sonnier in 1977. In collaboration with NASA, they utilised the experimental CTS
satellite in a 2-‐way transmission between New York and San Francisco. Within a two
and a half hour broadcast that drew “almost 25,000” spectators, artists discussed
the medium and performed improvised dances and music, interacting and
responding to the incoming video and audio streams.55
Two months later, the Satellite Arts Project – A Space with no Geographical
Boundaries led by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, also had a successful trans-‐
54 “Send/Receive Satellite Network | Art and Electronic Media,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/sendreceive-satellite-network. 55 Liza Bear, “Send/Receive Phase I and II Documents: 1977,” Send Receive Satellite Network 1977, February 8, 2009, http://sendreceivesatellitenetwork.blogspot.com/2009/02/sendreceive-phase-i-and-ii-documents.html.
26
continental performance.56 At a distance of three thousand miles apart, 4 dancers,
two in Maryland and two in California, co-‐ordinated their movements via screen
displays at each location.57
These two projects in many ways laid the foundation for the format of
contemporary telematic performances. The split-‐screen representation of distant
performers alongside issues such as latency and signal deterioration remain
common features to this day. Thankfully the demanding technological requirements
of satellite technology have been simplified for end users through the development
of the Internet. Galloway and Rabinowitz would go on to create further satellite-‐
based artworks, including Hole in Space (1980) that exchanged video feeds between
two storefronts in New York and Los Angeles. Life sized images of people on the
other coast led to spontaneous interactions between passers by:
“The archival footage shows groups starting to form in both places trying to
figure out where the images are coming from and what’s going on, and at the same
time some people initiate short greetings across the link to get to know the other
crowd. The environment starts to warm up quickly as people start clapping,
shouting and waving at each other, while some individuals exchange personal
details about themselves and their jobs to strangers in each city, much to everyone
else’s amusement.”58
Works such as Neuhaus’ Public Supply and Radio Net sought to create
artificially large virtual acoustic networks by using technology to expand upon
56 Joy, “NMSAT Vol. 3+4+5,” 151. 57 Ascott, Telematic Embrace, 60. 58 Joy, “NMSAT Vol. 3+4+5,” 163.
27
geographic constraints. Hole in Space however used technology to remove
geographic constraints entirely in attempting to create a portal between the two
storefronts. These two works exemplify the contrasting approaches taken by artists
when using telecommunications. While most contemporary telematic performances
attempt to achieve telepresence between performers using techniques akin to Hole
in Space, the capability to create virtual networks has been relatively under-‐
explored.
Figure 3. People gather to experience Galloway and Rabinowitz' Hole in Space 59
The first group focused on network-‐based music featured Northern
Californians Jim Horton, Tim Perkis, Rich Gold, and John Bischoff under the guise
The League of Automatic Music Composers. Using KIM-‐1 microcomputers the
members programmed their computers to create generative music.60 Data would
then be transferred via a network to the other member’s computers, influencing
their output. Performing first in March 1978, the group continued network music
59 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, “Hole in Space,” Text on Website: Http://www. Ecafe. com/getty/HIS, 1980. 60 Thomas B. Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition (Psychology Press, 2002).
28
experiments until 1983. Later reforming as The Hub with a modified line-‐up 61, the
group pioneered the use of data transfer for real-‐time musical collaboration over a
network.62
The first telematic collaborations across the Atlantic used text as the artistic
medium. Renowned telematic artist Roy Ascott organised Terminal Art, a three
week long experimental computer conferencing event in 1980 between 7 locations
in the US and UK. This platform would inform future projects including the Ars
Electronica-‐commissioned The World in 24 Hours, which featured artists across the
world that contributed via telephone and computer networks. This highly
ambitious project organised by Robert Adrian was plagued with technical problems
yet still furthered the envelope as to what was possible. 63 The efforts primarily
based around the I.P. Sharp network led the path for ARTBOX, a platform dedicated
for artists to experiment with networks, greatly reducing the cost of access to such
tools. ARTBOX (later ARTEX) provided email communication, event listings, and text
collaboration tools for the core group of 10 artists that utilised the platform
regularly.64 The platform was used for the successful collaborative text based
artwork La Plissure du Texte mentioned previously.
61 The six primary members were Mark Trayle, Phil Stone, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, and Tim Perkis. Ibid., 218. 62 Franziska Schroeder, “Dramaturgy as a Model for Geographically Displaced Collaborations: Views from Within and Views from Without 1,” Contemporary Music Review 28, no. 4–5 (2009): 3. 63 “Ars Electronica’82 / THE WORLD IN 24 HOURS,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://residence.aec.at/rax/24_HOURS/. 64 Joy, “NMSAT Vol. 3+4+5,” 162.
29
Satellite transmission remained the preferred platform for telematic transfer
of performances up until the late 1990s, and most notably for Nam June Paik’s large-‐
scale multimedia piece Good Morning Mr. Orwell in 1984. An ode to George Orwell’s
novel from 1948, the piece was intended “as a liberatory and multidirectional
alternative to the threat posed by ‘Big Brother’ surveillance.”65
While data-‐based collaborations such as the Planetary Network project from
the 1986 Venice Biennale,66 and more playful experiments such as Telephonic Arm
Wrestling67 furthered experimentation with network collaborations, the biggest
shift in the telematic landscape was the introduction of the Internet2 research
project in 1996.68 While the World Wide Web was already coming to fruition at this
stage, a consortium of university-‐based researchers that sought to advance Internet
technology made huge improvements in network speed and capacity.69 While
Internet2 was restricted to mostly university campuses, the dedicated
infrastructure was capable of the real-‐time transfer of uncompressed audio. For the
latter part of the 1990s, MIDI data transfer platforms such as NetJam and ResRocket
allowed Internet based musical collaborations, but it would not be until the new
millennium that the potential of Internet2 was harnessed by musicians. In
September 1999, researchers at McGill University transmitted a musical
65 Ascott, Telematic Embrace, 67. 66 “Planetary Network - Venice Biennale 1986,” accessed April 1, 2014, http://alien.mur.at/rax/UBIQUA/. 67 “Telephonic Arm-Wrestling — V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media,” accessed April 1, 2014, http://v2.nl/archive/works/telephonic-arm-wrestling. 68 For a detailed overview of pre-Internet2 telematic performances, the NMSAT database Vol. 3+4+5 features thorough documentation of experiments and concerts. http://locusonus.org/nmsat/ 69 Joy, “NMSAT Vol. 3+4+5,” 281.
30
performance from Montreal to New York using uncompressed multichannel audio.
The result was an uninterrupted transmission with 3 seconds of latency.70 The
SoundWire research initiative led by Chris Chafe at the Center for Computer
Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University began experimenting with
unidirectional real-‐time audio transfer experiments the same year, soon moving to
localised network experiments that achieved bi-‐directional transfer of audio with
less than 1 second of delay.71 The research group exhibited their work at the SC2000
conference in Dallas in November 2000. Even after inducing virtual network
congestion, they achieved two-‐channel bi-‐directional transfer of audio from Dallas
to Palo Alto with delay times that gave one “the impression of speaking or singing
into a large echo chamber.”72
Latency refers to the delay time induced by transmission distance and
network routing delays between locations. While turn-‐taking speech interaction can
be unaffected by delays as large as 500ms 73, ensemble music performance which
relies on synchronous rhythmic interaction requires a much shorter delay time.
70 Aoxiang Xu et al., “Real-Time Streaming of Multichannel Audio Data over Internet,” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 48, no. 7/8 (July 1, 2000): 627–41. 71 Chris Chafe et al., “A Simplified Approach to High Quality Music and Sound over IP,” in COST-G6 Conference on Digital Audio Effects (Citeseer, 2000), 159–64. 72 Ibid.; Greg Wood, “i2-News - I2-NEWS: Real-Time CD Quality Internet Audio Demonstration Wins SC2000 Award - Arc,” accessed April 15, 2014, https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/i2-news/2000-12/msg00000.html. 73 Jan Holub and Ondrej Tomiska, “Delay Effect on Conversational Quality in Telecommunication Networks: Do We Mind?,” in Wireless Technology (Springer, 2009), 91–98.
31
Studies by Chafe, Cáceres and Gurevich have shown the threshold of “playability” to
be between 55 and 66ms.74
In pursuit of uncompressed bi-‐directional audio transfer with minimal
latency, SoundWire’s efforts led to the development of JackTrip. The tuneable
application allows users to balance quality and speed, and has become the most
popular system for telematic music concerts to this day. The majority of telematic
performances today feature JackTrip handling audio transfer, with separate video
conferencing applications such as Skype, Google Hangouts, and Conference XP
providing less detailed visual feedback to performers and audience members. Raw
video data often requires far more bandwidth than is commonly available thus
requiring compression upon transfer as well as decompression upon playback.
Various compression formats (or encoders) induce differing but often substantial
amounts of latency. As accompanying video is often a secondary concern for
telematic music performance, the platforms listed above are among the most
commonly used despite their “lossy” compression techniques. This is largely due to
their readily accessible interfaces and simplified technological requirements. 75
74 Chris Chafe, Juan-Pablo Cáceres, and Michael Gurevich, “Effect of Temporal Separation on Synchronization in Rhythmic Performance,” Perception 39, no. 7 (2010). 75 For a detailed analysis of online video transfer (albeit from the pre-Skype era) see Dapeng Wu et al., “Streaming Video over the Internet: Approaches and Directions,” Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on 11, no. 3 (2001): 282–300.
32
As current research strives to reduce the problematic issues of temporal
separation 76 due to the inherent delays of online data transfer, 77 the potential for
networked sound installation art, as a relatively new art form, is rife for exploration.
In an inversion of McLuhan’s descriptions of networked media acting as an
outward extension of the body, performance artist Stelarc attached electrical muscle
stimulants to his body which in turn were actuated by web-‐based activity. “Pings,”
the internet equivalent to the sonar based distance mechanism, translated the
round-‐trip transmission times from IP addresses accessing the website into
electrical impulses that caused Stelarc’s body to convulse.78 Pings were used by
Chafe as a testing mechanism to judge round trip times of packets during his
experiments into low-‐latency audio transfer. By mapping the round trip time to a
sonified pitch (the longer the ping, the lower the pitch), Chafe presented this
sonification of the net as a standalone installation piece in 2001.79 This physical
manifestation of web based activity goes beyond web-‐based art projects such as
Neuhaus’ Auracle80, and the multitude of recent HTML5 web-‐based artworks that
utilise the more powerful graphical and audio processing capabilities available
76 Chafe, Cáceres, and Gurevich, “Effect of Temporal Separation on Synchronization in Rhythmic Performance.” 77 Juan-Pablo Cáceres and Chris Chafe, “Jacktrip/Soundwire Meets Server Farm,” Computer Music Journal 34, no. 3 (2010): 29–34. 78 “Stelarc - Ping Body | Art and Electronic Media,” accessed April 1, 2014, http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/document/stelarc-ping-body. 79 Peter Traub, “Sounding the Net: Recent Sonic Works for the Internet and Computer Networks,” Contemporary Music Review 24, no. 6 (2005): 459–81. 80 Jason Freeman et al., “Auracle: A Voice-Controlled, Networked Sound Instrument,” Organised Sound 10, no. 3 (2005): 221.
33
today. Atau Tanaka’s Global String (2001) furthers this concept by connecting two
15m long steel cables via the Internet, where “the network is its resonating body.”81
VI: What Lies Ahead
Due to increases in commercial bandwidth provisions and improved network
routing technologies, one can expect low latency audio and video transfer to free
itself from the restrictions of dedicated research networks and make its way into
homes and venues. Issues such as the loss of tangible presence via co-‐located
network performance can potentially be addressed through the Internet becoming
more physical, placing interactions within tangible objects rather than behind
screens. Developments in mobile technology have created a new generation of
interactive art works, where user participation need not rely on physical
interaction. For interactive art projects where group participation exists through
interacting via SMS or smartphone applications, we are developing expectations
that these pocket sized portable tools can have a great influence on the physical
world around us. With context aware technologies we are not only becoming more
connected to each other, but also to our environments. Installation art and
particularly sound installation bases its experience on the relationship between the
art object, its environment, and those within that environment. As web technology
allows us to experience distant events through screens and speakers, one might
81 Atau Tanaka and Bert Bongers, “Global String: A Musical Instrument for Hybrid Space,” in Proceedings: Cast01//Living in Mixed Realities, Fraunhofer Institut Fur Medienkommunikation, 2001, 177–81.
34
expect that future technologies will collapse the distance between us and distant
environments and objects, thus allowing us to have a physically present relationship
with networked art works.
35
Send a Message
I: Precursors and Origins of Send A Message
“As McLuhan argued, electronic media act as an extended nervous system
making us sensitive on a global scale. Thus, forms of social space and interaction
necessarily expand, bringing us in touch with a wider variety of communities’
value systems, pools of information and data, and interactions. These conditions
inspire a range of artistic initiatives based on utilizing the very features of network
society: sound and its location, or point of origin are broadcast through digital,
network media extending forms of sound installation and performance into global
dimensions.”
-LaBelle, Background Noise82
i: Previous Telematic Performance Work
During my time with the Digital Music Ensemble (DME), directed by Prof.
Stephen Rush in 2012, the ensemble focused on the practice of network
performance. The rehearsal process in telematic performances is often stunted by
intense setups due to time consuming technological requirements. DME sought to
improve upon the practice through intense collocated rehearsals before embarking
82 LaBelle, Background Noise, 249.
36
on multi-location performances. Rehearsals began in a traditional format with
everyone performing within the same space. Once satisfied with the quality of the
performance, we relocated into separate spaces around the building and rehearsed
via microphone and speaker connections, with long cable runs stretching along
corridors. Later, we used Internet connections, with performers still in different
spaces around the building in order to replicate performance conditions closer to
the final telematic performances.
Through this process, the benefits of local coordination and organization as
well as the relationships that developed between performers through daily contact
greatly enhanced the quality of performances. One of the more practical findings
arising from this process was the importance of spatialisation of sound sources
upon reproduction. Performers found the experience more rewarding when the
other locations were represented via separate speakers. For instance in a three-
location performance, two speakers would be placed on either side of the
physically performing musicians in each location. The separation allowed
physically present musicians to greater comprehend who was performing and be
able to respond more appropriately through their musical gestures.
Representing the geographical locations of the distant performers via the
placement of speakers in the space further aided in distinguishing the origins of the
distant performers. For example, performers that were geographically located
Northeast of the physical performers would be represented by placing their speaker
in that respective position in the room. However in multi-location setups, this was
37
only helpful if the geographical locations were such that there was no more than
one location being represented from a similar orientation. 83
Less tangible factors such as the relationships between and familiarity with
the musicality of the performers within the group also aided the quality of
performances. These factors are often lost in telematic performances as the distant
performers rarely meet face-to-face and cannot develop the familiarity that is
undoubtedly important in building a bond between musicians. Meditations through
the lens of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practices added an additional, more
experiential factor to the group’s musicianship.
Throughout the rehearsal process, it became evident that particular types of
compositions and scores were more suitable for telematic performance than others.
Rhythmic synchronicity between disparate performers is an issue within telematic
performance. Beyond simply the time it takes for a sound to travel from instrument
to microphone - the digitization of a signal, its subsequent transfer over the network
and re-synthesis combine to introduce a substantial delay that can hinder musical
performance. Much in the same way a telephone call with a long delay can cause
a conversation to become difficult, a delay between musical performers becomes
particularly problematic. Studies have shown latency intervals as little as 55ms can
83 For a thorough discussion of the advantages of spatialisation for remote streams in live telematics performance, see Michael Gurevich, Dónal Donohoe, and Stéphanie Bertet, “Ambisonic Spatialization for Networked Music Performance,” Paper Presented at The 17th International Conference on Auditory Display, Budapest, Hungary, 1.
38
have drastic consequences in the accuracy of rhythmic performance,84 with
variable latency proving even more problematic.85
In order to overcome this issue where our web-based experiments created
time delays of ~50ms and up, we found that any rhythmic content in a piece that
requires more than one performer should situate these performers in the same
geographic location. Various compositional considerations can be made for the
performance of telematic music such as the use of drones, slow paced melodies, as
well as embracing the overlapping gestures that may occur in rhythmic sections
due to latency.86
Some of our performances used chance procedures to create related
structures between separately located ensembles, thus removing the need for
careful listening yet still creating a cohesive performance (such as within
performances of Cage’s Four6). Throughout the rehearsal process, it was our
finding that open-ended graphic scores were the best received under the condition
that listening remained a primary concern to all performers, more so than detailed
interpretation of the score. A reinterpretation of these practices was presented as a
84 Chafe, Cáceres, and Gurevich, “Effect of Temporal Separation on Synchronization in Rhythmic Performance,” 9. 85 Chris Chafe and Michael Gurevich, “Network Time Delay and Ensemble Accuracy: Effects of Latency, Asymmetry,” in Audio Engineering Society Convention 117 (Audio Engineering Society, 2004). 86 Sarah Weaver, “Latency: Music Composition and Technology Solutions for Perception of Synchrony in ‘ResoNations 2010: An International Telematic Music Concert for Peace’” (New York University, 2011).
39
performance between University of Michigan, and CCRMA, Stanford as part of the
NetMusic2013 Conference.87
A later series of compositions by DME that utilised the Internet as the
performing medium led to the creation of iaMan by Corey Smith. The piece plays
with the anonymity of Internet users in social media contexts but also the deeply
personal confessions and interactions that many users share online. The piece
features Smith projected via Skype into the concert hall from his bedroom. As he
recites a monologue filled with personal information, confessions, and feelings -
keywords from his monologue are searched on Monitter, a website that shows real
time tweets containing pre-defined search terms. As the audience listens to Smith’s
personal monologue, they see a stream of incoming tweets that share some of the
same terms. The tweets range from unsettling to trivial, yet no single tweet gains
precedence. For example during a performance, the search term ‘I almost died’ led
to results that shared seemingly genuine near-death experiences blended amongst
flippant remarks and gossip. A separate performer tweets lines of text from the
monologue and occasionally those tweets appear onscreen via Monitter. As the
audience gains privileged access to Smith’s inner thoughts as he is being beamed in
online, the placement of his tweets in the context of the widely varying incoming
stream leads one to question the highly personal, yet detached relationship that we
have with the Internet.
87 “Symposium Program & Schedule | Net-Music 2013: The Internet as Creative Resource in Music,” accessed April 9, 2014, http://netmusic2013.wordpress.com/symposium-program/.
40
Despite the multiplicity of mediatised layers between the physically present
performers, the one-to-one virtual connection between narrator and audience, as
well as the embedding of the narrator within a larger web of online users, I believe
the piece still achieves a sense of liveness 88 due to its strong narrative with which
the audience can willingly engage.
ii: Previous Installation Work
In April 2013, as part of an interaction design class, I was tasked with
creating an interactive installation piece. At the time, the Duderstadt Center Library
was filled with University of Michigan students enduring the stresses of final
examinations, and I was concerned at the dramatic change in behaviour amongst
them. Despite all of the students experiencing the same exam stresses in the same
environment, there was little communication and no channel for conscious
reflection or emotional exchange. As part of my installation piece, I knew I wanted
to counteract this trend in some way, and provide some platform, no matter how
minimal, that might invite people to share how they are feeling with each other in
order to ease this unsettling atmosphere.
In order for this idea to work, I took into consideration the behaviours of
those I was looking to attract to this installation. Given the busy schedules of the
students, the installation had to be approachable at any time for convenience’s
88 Liveness in the sense described by Philip Auslander in ‘Liveness: Performance in a Mediatised Culture, p.2, London: Routledge
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sake. As people were having difficulty sharing their emotions and experiences face-
to-face, I wanted to create an asynchronous exchange for messages between
students. For this, I drew inspiration from religious examples such as the Jewish
holy site, the Western Wall, and the Japanese Shinto prayer walls, where people
leave personal messages to a medium in order for them to be received elsewhere.
The practice of leaving written notes within the cracks of the Western Wall dates
back to the 1800s. Interestingly, it has evolved alongside technology, with fax
machines and email allowing people to send prayers or requests to the wall from
home.89 An online service even allows one to type messages within the browser.
The messages are then printed and placed on the wall, with thousands printed in
very small font each day.90
As messages to the Western Wall are written as expressions of prayer and
self-reflection, anonymity (particularly as is readily achieved via the Internet)
enables one to share personal confessions more comfortably, even with the
knowledge that many people may read them. Such an example includes the candid
website Post-secret, an “ongoing community art project where people mail in their
secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.”91 The submissions displayed
online range from the humorous to disturbing. The artistic natures of these
submissions also add an additional expressive element alongside the messages.
89 Joyce Shira Starr, Faxes and Email to God: At the Western Wall of Jerusalem (iUniverse, 1999). 90 “Place a Note in the Wall,” Aishcom, accessed April 3, 2014, http://www.aish.com/w/note/46615192.html. Aish.com 91 “PostSecret,” accessed April 3, 2014, http://postsecret.com/.
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The human voice is capable of expressing extremely nuanced emotional
cues more efficiently and effectively than any other communication mechanism. I
was inspired by Pain Pack, a project by online media artist Ze Frank, as it displays
this capability of the voice in the recordings he collected. By posting a telephone
number online, people were asked to submit messages describing emotional pain
to an answering machine.92 Receiving permission to publish six of these messages,
the audio was then heavily edited into percussive samples and released as a sample
library for musicians and composers. For me, the sample pack is not the interesting
part of this project, but rather I find the emotional power of the raw unedited
recordings is something to behold. Even listening to submissions from languages
that I do not understand, the expressive qualities of the voices in these recordings
are capable of capturing an exceptional degree of emotion.
From these cues, I developed sketches based on the metaphor of an
answering machine. Answering machines provide situations (often exploited by
soap operas) where the caller can potentially offer more honest responses than if
they were aware of being currently listened to.
92 “Pain Pack,” Ze Frank: Pain Pack, accessed April 3, 2014, http://www.zefrank.com/pain_pack.
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Figure 4. An early sketch for Leave a Message
In order to ensure people would be comfortable contributing to this public
answering machine, it was important that they understood how their voice
integrated into the installation. Users need to hear the body of messages that they
would be contributing toward before leaving their own message. Adhering to the
concept of bringing together peoples’ individual feelings as they go through similar
exam stresses and experiences, the playback of recorded messages are arranged to
overlap and blend between each other, so that multiple voices are heard at any one
time, yet their playback is staggered throughout time so that each message gains
slight precedence at some point within a minute long loop. 10 recorded messages
of up to 20 seconds can be recorded, with the oldest being erased as soon as a
person speaks into the mouthpiece. These recordings are played back on a
continuous loop.
While picking up a telephone from its holstered position would have
suggested dead-air, as well as a necessity to initiate the interaction, by presenting
the telephone off-the-hook and at head height, the messages are ever present.
44
Casually listening to a phone that is already off-the-hook is also perhaps a little less
unnerving than picking up a telephone from its base. Presenting the work publicly
and allowing users to only contribute if they wish removed the stigma of intrusion,
allowing listeners to gain access to others’ thoughts and feelings through honest
means.93
For many participants this is where their interaction with the installation can
end. Simply listening to the thoughts of others and perhaps going back to the
installation at different times of the day or week to see how it may have changed is
no less enlightening an experience to be gained than those who choose to
contribute. A written prompt beside the installation encourages users to say ‘Hello’
into the mouthpiece. As soon as one chooses to do so, an envelope follower within
the Max/Msp code tuned to seek out amplitude envelopes similar to the human
voice, is exceeded. The other messages are then faded out and an operator asks
you to leave a message. Your voice is then recorded, stopping once you finish
speaking. Afterward it plays back your message through once, and then fades back
in the previous recordings while you can hear your message weaved into the mix.
93 The second exhibition of Leave a Message at the Work Gallery occurred during increased press coverage of the NSA data gathering and spying scandals in September 2013. Whereas the issue of privacy and storage of recordings as part of this installation was not an issue during the first exhibition, it was a concern many shared with me during the second exhibition. This may have also have had considerable affects on the content of peoples’ interaction with the installation, as there were fewer contributions of personal thoughts and feelings during the second exhibition.
45
Figure 5. Three sketches for prompts to be placed on the wall beside a telephone
Unbeknownst to me at the time of creating this installation, Dick Higgins
presented a similar concept at the 1969 Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
exhibition Art by Telephone. Higgins “asked visitors to speak into a telephone,
adding their voices to an ever denser ‘vocal collage.’”94 I believe Higgins’ piece
and Leave a Message both draw from the curious desires of many of us to not just
listen to each other’s telephone conversations, but also attempt to read the minds,
feelings, and thoughts of those around us. While the intentions behind Leave a
Message may have been closer to social intervention than sound art, the aesthetics
of the piece match closely the work by Higgins 44 years previous.
Entitled Leave a Message, I planned from its conception to feature multiple
telephones, between 6 and 12, in order to ask different questions of its users and
attempt to draw out different emotions through various prompts. The first iteration
featured prompts spoken by the operator such as ‘How are you feeling today?’ and
94 Shanken, Introduction to Telematic Embrace, 58.
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‘What are you looking forward to the most today?’ which often led to the most
intriguing responses. More frivolous prompts such as “Make your favourite sound,”
“Sing me a song”, and “What did you have for breakfast” lightened to the tone
between telephones, and also tended to receive relatively tangential yet playful
replies.
The installation was placed in a common study area at the centre of the
Duderstadt library, where students study around the clock. During the day when
the space was busiest, users tended to listen more rather than contribute.
Contributions were also clearly affected by those that were self aware of those
around them during these hours. The most enlightening and meaningful messages
were often those left in the middle of the night. While many of the messages
recorded featured mentions of various exam stresses, more personal confessions
such as disdain for ones parents, anxiety toward moving city, or fear for a
neighbours’ dog that they suspected was being abused, provided insights that
perhaps one might not have shared with those around them in person.95
The installation was also presented months later at the Work Gallery space
in Ann Arbor as part of the Test Kitchen exhibition curated by Ann Bartges.96
Situated this time in a more traditional gallery space for a month, the installation
was not as successful as the exhibition in the library. This relationship between
people and their environment influenced the outcome of the installation greatly.
95 Video documentation of this installation is included in the multimedia appendix. 96 “Exhibitions: Test Kitchen | Stamps School of Art & Design,” accessed April 3, 2014, http://stamps.umich.edu/exhibitions/detail/test_kitchen.
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The set of expectations one has going into an art gallery space removed the
spontaneous honesty that was possible upon encountering the installation within
an everyday environment like the study area of a library. While the opening
reception gathered a plethora of playful messages, the installation remained
relatively stagnant despite re-workings of more suitable prompts within the gallery
space.
iii: North American Music
In Spring 2013, the Digital Music Ensemble embarked upon a projected
entitled North American Music (N.A.M.). Rather than use a near-instant audio
transmission system such as JackTrip to represent performers from a distance, we
wanted to create a single large acoustic environment that would allow performers
to be represented from their geographically accurate locations by using the natural
speed of sound as the pace of transmission. While of course we would require the
assistance of technology in order to overcome the natural inverse square law of
acoustic decay, one could work out the distances between performance locations,
and divide it by the speed of sound to calculate the length of time it would take
sound to travel from one location to the other.
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Sound is surprisingly slow when compared to the speeds at which modern
communications can achieve. At roughly 1,234km/h 97 sound is much slower than
Radio transmission (which travel at the speed of light, 1,079,252,762.46 km/h) and
fiber optic cable transmission (~31% less than the speed of light for silica glass
cables). From New York to San Francisco, sound in air would take 3 hours and 22
minutes to reach its destination. Similarly from Ann Arbor to Detroit, a sound
would take 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Just as our aural system uses time of arrival
delay between ears to assist with the localisation of sound sources, another
expanded form of representation of sources from distinct geographical locations
could be the reinsertion of the speed of sound in transmission. Through such a
system, each venue would have a unique listening experience based on the
conditions of their location on global scale.
The original plans for N.A.M. included a performance using this mechanism
with contacts in Buenos Aires, however a quick calculation resulted in a time delay
of over seven hours. This led to a downscaling of the project to 4 locations in the
United States; University of Michigan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The time delays between the three locations
suggested the creation of a generative compositional structure. With an open score
featuring multiple ‘cells’ composed by Carolina Heredia, each location would play
the opening gesture once at the strike of 7pm Eastern Time. Everyone would then
wait in silence until the opening gestures from the distant locations arrived to their
location, where they would listen, join in, and then develop a response. This
97 767 mph in dry air, at sea level, at 68 °F or 20 °C
49
response would then generate a further 2 responses from the other locations, as the
amount of musical content travelling between Michigan, New York, and Illinois
grows exponentially.
Figure 6. Details of time delays overlaid on the visualisation developed by Macklin Underdown for North American Music
A computer simulation of the generative score using the necessary time
delays led to interesting compositional results.98 Inevitably the opening hour of the
concert would remain quite sparse and grow denser as the piece develops over the
course of four hours. Occasional moments of silence hours into the piece came
from the consequential timings of waiting for sound to arrive, only to be followed
by flurries of intense activity.
98 A list of timings and x60 scale audification of the timings are included in the multimedia appendix.
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Taking place on April 2nd, the performance saw Digital Music Ensemble
joined by experimental guitarist Elliot Sharp performing from Ann Arbor, members
of Pauline Oliveros’ Tintinnabulate Ensemble from Troy, New York, and students
from UIUC alongside veteran bassist Henry Grimes. Sound reinforcement at our
venue separated the locations of the other venues according their relative
geography.
In retrospect I personally believe there were too many issues working
against us for this to be a success. Primarily the number of musicians between all of
the sites, greater than eighteen, is hard to coordinate within a scored
improvisational setting without rehearsal (even if everyone were to be present in
the same location). This only reinforced our prior emphasis on the importance of
localised rehearsals prior to telematic performances. The last-minuteness of UIUC’s
preparations due to their busy concert schedule that day also led to a less than
favourable mix coming from their location.99
II: From Performance to Installation
Long after this concert, I still believed in concept behind the piece despite
the poor initial result. Early attempts in the concert for musicians to communicate
99 A rare respite to an overzealous synthesizer performer led to a 10 minute solo from Henry Grimes, one of the more musically wonderful moments of the concert.
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and interact with the incoming music before the structure loosened were intriguing
to me. In conversation with performers afterward, some felt that they paid closer
attention to the musical gestures they performed due to how their actions would be
heard not just by the local present audience, but also two other sets of audiences
and performers at the other locations, forty and sixty minutes later. It was as if their
gestures had more consequence due to their augmented acoustic longevity.
This interesting feedback drew comparisons of the pre-telecommunicative
era when letters posted though the mail were often written with far more care and
investment than perhaps emails are today. It is as if the length of time it takes to
deliver a message, amplifies its meaning and consequence. The benefits of modern
communications are clear to see; the widespread access and exchange of
information has permanently changed global society, yet instant messaging services
have had drastic consequences upon human interaction. We have quickly become
acclimatised to the direct and instant manner of communication via the Internet. As
VoIP services and data-based instant messaging platforms continue to replace
carrier-confined telephone and SMS communications, borders are further blurred,
as anyone with a device connected to the Internet can be contacted within
seconds. We have developed an expectation to be able to contact who ever we
want instantly at any time, shrinking the perceived physical distance between us.
Just as the predominantly used Mercator map projection has skewed our perception
of the layout of our planet, the abundant use of instant communications that
permeates our everyday lives has distorted our understanding of the scale of our
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planet. I believe that using the speed of sound in the natural world as the pace of
audio communication leads one to reflect on the true scale of our planet.
Throughout my time at Michigan my focus has been split between studying
interaction design - particularly within installation art, and telematic performance. I
had always considered an attempt to fuse these aspects of my work, and examine
the nature of performance, collaboration, and communication across long
distances through a networked installation piece. The ideation of Send a Message
owes itself to many distinct factors that until a retrospective study I was never quite
able to verbalise. In its simplest form, my thesis installation draws from the
common issues that hinder the fantastic potential of telematic performance and
uses a reductive simplification of these issues as a starting point. While this artwork
is not an attempt to resolve these issues, it explores why these aspects are important
in the nature of long distance communication. 100 Telematic performances are
largely experimental, and the limitations of the medium need to be actively
explored through a variety of means in order to be understood as a tool that can
serve a later purpose in art making. This desire to use an interactive installation
piece to explore the practice of telematic music performance extends from the
sentiment expressed by Achim Wollshied in his book “Resolving Interactions”:
100 “Socially, it is the accumulation of group pressures and irritations that prompt invention and innovation as counter-irritants” - McLuhan, Understanding Media, 46.
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“My hypothesis is that interactive art helps to establish a change of attitude,
which will in the future be of importance for all artistic pragmatics.”101
This is also not to say that Send a Message’s presentation as a sound
installation lessens its relationship and relevancy toward musical performance. As
Ouzounian states;
“Many important links exist between these traditions (sound installation art
and musical performance), but these connections are obscured within discourses
that continue to perpetuate artificial disciplinary boundaries.”102
In “Digital Performance”, Steve Dixon lists four levels of user interaction that
exist in interactive art and performance: Navigation, Participation, Conversation,
and Collaboration.103 Navigation alludes to the presentation of options of pre-
defined choices to an audience, whereas participation enables audiences to
influence the work in dynamic ways. While these first two levels are readily
achievable within the context of performers interacting with each other over a
network, I believe conversation and collaboration require a level of engagement
that is often beyond the reach of most telematic performances. All four levels of
interaction exist in exchanges between performers in traditional format music
101 Achim Wollscheid, Resolving Interactions (Frankfurt: Selektion, 2003), n.d., 56. Found in LaBelle, Background Noise, 243. 102 Ouzounian, “Sound Art and Spatial Practices,” 40. 103 Steve. Dixon, Digital Performance a History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, Leonardo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 563.
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concerts, whereas within networked settings they are frequently lost as the concerts
can take the form of simultaneous yet disparate performances of the same piece.
In response, this installation reverts from music to speech as a simpler and
more accessible form of communication. I believe that looking back to speech
based conversation and collaboration will help us to understand the nature of
musical conversation and collaboration over long distances.
The choice of speech as the communication mechanism and previous
successes with the use of telephone handsets within installation settings influenced
my decision to use telephone handsets as the physical interactive device that
provides input and output to the installation.
By far the most intriguing aspect of telematic performance for musicians and
composers alike is the promise of direct connectivity between performers and
audiences regardless of geographic location. As argued by Schroeder and Rebelo,
seeking out seamless synchronous presence with disparate performers is a naïve
approach to take given the inherent impediments within network communications.
104 Much like how the recording studio introduced a “significant shift in attitudes to
performance”, “the network presents a similar shift in attitude and practice.” 105
While I understandably respect experiments into telepresence as essential to
the furtherance of telematic performance for rehearsal purposes (for example), I
believe that many such telematic concerts overlook the necessity for different
104 Felipe Hickmann, “Territories of Secrecy” (Queens University Belfast, 2013), 96. 105 Franziska Schroeder and Pedro Rebelo, “Sounding the Network: The Body as Disturbant,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16, no. 4–5 (2009).
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performance and representation strategies than found within traditional
performance due to this dislocation. This is particularly evident in the regular use of
video conferencing tools in telematic concerts. Quite often the positioning of
cameras and projection screens present a coherent ensemble for the audience, yet
the performers are at a disadvantage, unable to exchange subtle cues and gestures
from an angle. To acknowledge that the disparate performers will never quite be
there and will always be a step removed, no matter how immersive the
technological communications setup can be, means to acknowledge the true
nature of performing over the network rather than performing multiple versions of
oneself simultaneously within various geographic locations. For example, since
2007, Rebelo, Schroeder, Renaud, and Gualda have suggested the use of avatars to
represent the disparate performers, from abstract geometric visualisations106 to
virtual reality simulations such as within Second Life.107
In Whispering Places, Michael Gurevich used the medium of an interactive
telematic installation to “highlight the paradoxes of space, location, and direction
raised by real-time networked audio interaction, and exploit them in an artistic
manner.”108 The piece combined ambisonic spatialisation with gravitational force
algorithms according to the longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates of three
participating venues in Palo Alto, Belfast, and Paris. The piece required participants
to whisper (any speech was excluded through spectral tilt analysis), making it
106 Ibid., 5,6. 107 Pedro Rebelo, “Disparate Bodies-A Three Way Network Performance,” 2010. 108 Franziska Schroeder, “SL’ÉTUDE: Performative Presence Rendered Across Worlds” (DRHA 2009 Conference, Sonic Arts Research Center, Belfast, 2009).
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difficult to identify individual voices. Looped messages recorded from all locations
were superimposed on top of messages from the other locations. This virtual
conglomerate of acoustic spaces was then reproduced at each physical location,
thus creating a space where participants existed both physically and virtually
concurrently. 109
With Send a Message, I wanted to counteract the perhaps pervasive notion
that simultaneous telepresence is the most effective and aesthetically desirous form
of telematic representation for artistic purposes. Drawing from the concepts of
using networks to establish virtual environments such as within Public Supply and
Radio Net, as well as the reinsertion of geographic relevancy as seen in North
American Music, this installation strives to give credence to the physical location of
each participant with respect to the globe.
While the use of a telephone handset as the communication mechanism
within the installation suggests point-to-point communication rather than tapping
into an expanded acoustic environment, it remained the interface of choice for
many reasons. The telephone is the most widely recognised tool for distant voice
communication. From a practical point of view, users know how to interact with a
telephone handset without instructions. Simply placing the handset to you ear and
mouth is all that is required to enter the installation. If this were to be a microphone
and headset, I believe one’s potential unfamiliarity with sound equipment or an
109 Gurevich, Donohoe, and Bertet, “Ambisonic Spatialization for Networked Music Performance,” 6.
57
expectation to initiate interaction (such as pressing play) would have provided an
obstacle. By having the telephones hanging from the ceiling, they are already off-
the-hook, and I believe more inviting to users than if it were placed on a base.
We are conditioned through experience to expect another person to be on
the other end of the telephone. While the concept of transmission at the speed of
sound may be a complex concept to grasp, the use of telephone handsets suggests
that there are indeed other real people at the other end of the line. If this were a
microphone and handset, one may sooner expect recorded playback or
manipulation of one’s voice. I liken the use of the telephone within the context of
this installation to a global party line, connecting people from distant places to the
same conversation.
III: Technical Details
Hardware
The majority of the physical components of this installation were developed
during the creation of Leave a Message in April 2013. A set of 10 black Cisco
telephone handsets was purchased, due to their easily interface-able 4 pin
connectors and use of electret microphones. Electret microphones replaced Carbon
microphones in telephone handset models developed after 1980. Much like
condenser microphones, electret microphones require power, albeit much less than
the 48 Volts phantom power provides. Telephone lines supply +48V to landline
58
telephones, however the power for the microphone is stepped down significantly.
Upon probing a connected landline telephone, the DC voltage going to the
microphone was seen to be ~0.7V with minimal current draw.
Drawing from the same mechanism as powering a small electret
microphone with a battery, the following circuit was used.
Figure 7. Schematic of the telephone handset converter circuit. A single AA battery acts as the power source.
The speaker signal needs no conditioning and can be passed straight
through at near line-level. The earliest prototype of this circuit did not use
connectors and hard wired the coiled telephone cable and audio cables to the
circuit board.
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Figure 8. An early telephone audio converter prototype
This design was far too susceptible to cable strain disconnecting the wires
from the circuit so a more robust iteration featured a telephone 4P4C connector
jack with two separate mono 1/8” audio sockets. Coupled with the use of a 2x3x1”
plastic enclosure, the final units are sturdy, and survived postage across the
Atlantic.
Figure 9. The final audio converter unit
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Figure 10. An overview of components in the project.
The final posted portions of the installation included a telephone handset,
the audio converter unit, 25ft coiled telephone cable, and 2 x 50ft 1/8” audio
cable.
Software
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The audio processing for North American Music was built using JavaScript
and developed within the Processing IDE. The ‘Beads’ library was used for audio
playback and recording.110 Using RAM buffers for a delay line in this context was
unfeasible and unreliable. With an hour-long delay line, a stereo 44.1kHz, 16-bit
file would require over 600MB of RAM. As there would be multiple delay lines
going at once, this would reach the limits of the available 4GB of RAM a 32bit
program would be able to access. There would also have been no recovery
mechanism if there were an error within the RAM buffer. Because of this, Colin
Fulton developed a double buffering technique that recorded a series of 10-minute
audio files. These files would then be uploaded to the server with a timestamp and
location tag as the filename. The other computers could then download the
appropriate files based on timestamp calculations, and stitch the audio files back
together. Two recording buffers and two playback buffers with slight overlaps
crossfade between files to ensure smooth transitions between files.
The system worked well but there was one essential flaw that was not
rectified before the concert. Each time an audio file was written to the hard-drive,
the system would pause the playback of audio for up to three seconds until the file
write was complete. This caused jarring disruptions to the concert every 10
minutes.
This critical problem with the original code led me to recreate the software
within the graphical programming software MaxMsp that is dedicated to real-time
110 “Whispering Places (2010) | Michael Gurevich,” accessed April 15, 2014, http://michaelgurevich.com/?page_id=55.
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audio processing. While file-handling, folder structures, and simple loop iterations
are somewhat trickier to achieve in Max when compared to more traditional
computer programming languages, the reliable and stable DSP features of MaxMsp
removed the previous problems.
Figure 11. The final MaxMsp interface for the installation
The code has four main sections; system timing, delay calculations,
recording and playback.
Timing
In order to be capable of calculating accurate delay times between locations
according to the speed of sound, series of one-minute recordings are used. By
rounding up all of the calculations to the nearest minute, the code can attain
relatively accurate timings while not over-complicating timestamp codes for the
audio files.
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The [date] object in Max is susceptible to drifting inaccurately. It checks the
computer’s system clock upon loading the patch, it then estimates values based on
MaxMsp’s scheduler from then on. In place of this the MXJ (Max Java External)
“Now” is used which consistently uses the system clock. In turn, modern operating
systems synchronise their system clocks to Network Time Protocol servers. A
timestamp is generated by combining the date, month and minutes elapsed since
midnight as one string of numbers. All of the locations must have their system time
set to UTC, in order to simplify the calculations and avoid issues with time-zones
and date-lines.
Delay Calculations
In preparation for this installation, a small MaxMsp patch was developed
allowing one to enter the longitudes and latitudes for two locations. The program
would then calculate the distance as-the-crow-flies between those too locations as
well as the number of minutes it would take a sound to travel between those
locations.
Figure 12. Distance and Speed of Sound Delay Calculator
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This patch relies on a small amount of JavaScript code 111that takes the
longitudes and latitudes and calculates the distance using the Haversine Formula:
c = 2.atan2(√a, √(1−a)) d = R.c
The Haversine Formula calculates the great circle distance across the surface of the
Earth between two points, ignoring the slight equatorial bulge of the planet as well
as any hills. It is accurate to within 0.5%. The resulting kilometres are then divided
by 20.4174, the speed of sound in kilometres per minute at sea level at 20 °C in
dry air.
The final Max patch subtracts the resulting values from the current time of
day in minutes to create appropriate time-stamps for the playback mechanism, thus
delaying the playback according to the speed of sound delay from their respective
locations.
Recording
The recording section of the code uses two alternating buffers. The incoming
audio from the telephone is recorded to a 65 second buffer, which is then written
to disk with the appropriate time and location-stamped filename and directed to
the server folder. New recordings are made on the alternate buffer for every minute
111 Included in appendix
65
elapsed. The five additional seconds are necessary for the crossfade that will occur
upon playback between files.
The files are down-sampled to a quarter of the audio interface’s sample rate as they
are being recorded. On a 44.1kHz system this equates to 11.025kHz. As
telephones use a very narrow portion of the frequency band for speech (roughly
300 to 3500Hz), the placement of the Nyquist frequency at 5512.5Hz records all of
the necessary detail of the telephone’s microphone signal, while also minimising
the filesize, thus saving hard drive and web server space. With 8 locations in the
installation contributing audio with these parameters, the total space required for
one day of operation is roughly 15GB.
The cloud storage service Dropbox was chosen to act as the server
mechanism for this installation. Dropbox proved to be infallible in previous tests,
with options to utilise unrestricted upload and download bandwidth. The service
provides clear notifications of when files are uploaded or removed and the ease of
distribution of files amongst participants proved to be helpful. By placing the Max
patches in the shared Dropbox folder, I was capable of editing sub-patches and
have them updated in real-time to the other locations, as well as monitoring the
installation from any location.
Playback
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Figure 13. The playback mechanism for one location
A playback buffer is loaded with a file containing the appropriate time and
location stamp and played back at a quarter of the sample rate. Each minute
interval crossfades the output between the two playback buffers. Once the
playback of a file reaches 65 seconds and is then silent, the next file in the series
replaces it. If Max cannot find the appropriate file, the buffer is cleared so as to
prevent looped playback of the last available file. This may occur if the connection
from a location fails and the upload of files is prevented.
Visuals
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From its conception I understood the necessity for a visual display to
accompany this piece. As part of North American Music, Macklin Underdown
developed a Processing sketch that mapped North America and displayed the
locations of the performing locations. As an amplitude threshold was exceeded at
any venue, a visualisation of a propagating soundwave emerged from that location
and travelled slowly outward so that the circumference would cross over a location
as soon as that sound was heard.
Figure 14. Violinist and composer Carolina Heredia performs in front of Macklin Underdown's visualisation as part of North American Music
While the visualisation functioned erratically during the concert, I believe it
provided a visual reference that explained the concept behind the piece in a simple
and elegant way. In order to replicate soundwaves propagating outward, an
azimuthal map projection from the point of origin simplifies the need to transform
the circle’s proportions as it grows. Initial sketches featured an azimuthal map
alongside a more traditional projection, as it was confusing to visually comprehend
where the other venues in the installation were located from the azimuthal
projection.
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Figure 15. Initial mock-‐up of the visualisation for Send a Message
Using node.js and socket.io, two javascript systems for real-time web
applications, Underdown constructed a website capable of receiving timing and
event information from any web client. Envelope followers track the presence of a
voice on the incoming signal at each location within the Max patch. If one speaks
into the telephone and the threshold is exceeded, a small amount of Ruby code
(using the jRuby Max external)112 creates a http request with the namespace of the
location from where that person is speaking. The cloud based web development
platform “Heroku” 113 then receives the request via Node.js and animates a simple
pulse at that location on the map. The website also calculates relative timings of
112 “The Beads Project - Realtime Audio for Java and Processing,” accessed April 8, 2014, http://www.beadsproject.net/. 113 Adam Murray, “Compusition, JRuby for Max,” accessed April 13, 2014, http://compusition.com/software/maxmsp/jruby_for_max.
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delays between locations using the “moment.js” library114, and displays the times at
which a message will arrive at the other locations if one were to speak into the
telephone.
The open source “D3.js” library for data-driven documents features a set of
map projections, including an equidistant azimuthal projection.115 The clarity of
this map removed the need for a separate, more traditional projection.
Figure 16. An early sketch of the visualisation
114 “Heroku | Cloud Application Platform,” accessed April 13, 2014, https://www.heroku.com/. 115 “Moment.js | Parse, Validate, Manipulate, and Display Dates in Javascript.,” accessed April 13, 2014, http://momentjs.com/.
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Figure 17. The visualisation from Belfast's point of view
IV: The Collaborative Process
Just as telematic artworks attempt to connect distant participants, the
very process of creating that artwork requires distant collaborators. One needs
to embrace the chaos of distributing the ownership of a project and placing
faith that others will follow through. Telematic music performances often use
dedicated research networks with higher bandwidth and speed capabilities that
are usually limited to academic institutions. Due to this limitation,
collaborations between particular universities with access to the Internet2
network have been responsible for the majority of telematic performance
experimentation.
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Artistic collaborations naturally extend from personal relationships, yet as
we attempt to create telematic artworks, we may not have access to collaborators
in distant locations with whom we already have personal relationships. The
necessity for internet based platforms to assist web-collaborations has led to the
creation of services such as “collabfinder.com” 116 however there are countless
virtues to meeting someone face-to-face before embarking on such a collaboration.
As it turned out, those that I had met face-to-face, even if it were only for a
few minutes, were far more likely to become involved in the final installation.
While I inevitably drew from previous relationships from my time in Northern
Ireland, I was at a loss to source collaborators that I knew would have an interest in
undertaking such a project. I also realised the importance of involving other
nationalities and languages as part of this installation, if it were to provide a
commentary on the nature of distant communication on a global scale. 117
In November 2013, I attended the Inst-Int conference in Minneapolis, a
gathering dedicated to the discussion of interactive installation. Despite the
majority of attendees’ work being based on the web, the conference emphasised
the necessity for people to meet in person to aid the potential for future
collaborations. As many of the attendees had a similarly strong interest in
interactive installations and the web, I targeted this as an opportunity to gain
116 “Geo Projections · mbostock/d3 Wiki · GitHub,” accessed April 13, 2014, https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Geo-Projections. 117 “The patterns of the senses that are extended in the various languages of men are as varied as the styles of dress and art. Each mother tongue teaches its users a way of seeing and feeling the world and of acting in the world that is quite unique.” McLuhan, Understanding Media, 80.
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collaborators for this project. During a 10-minute pitch presentation, I explained
the basics of the installation and gave illustrations of how it would work. I made
sure to emphasise the opportunity for creative input for all collaborators in this
project. I believed that this invitation of creative agency within the project would
provide an appealing impetus to those that seek out new experimental art forms
and would in turn enhance the project with their collective expertise. Following
this presentation I received many responses from people wishing to host a
telephone and be involved in the project. From the dozen or so responses, seven
were firmly on board and enthusiastic about working on the project in the near
future. With an exchange of business cards, I sent a follow up email a week after
the conference giving more details about the project. As is the nature of email
communication, some previously enthusiastic responders chose not, or forgot to
reply. Others expressed their willingness to help, but also mentioned their lack of
physical resources and / or time to participate. In the end, three people I met at the
conference were involved in the final project. These three participants from
Portland, Boston, and Oslo, also became key collaborators in the project, as they
were the most engaged throughout the process.
In an attempt to attract more collaborators from outside of Europe and the
United States, I asked friends for contact details of people with an interest in sound
art that they may know around the world. I received plenty of emails and Skype
usernames, and many responses to speculative emails with descriptions of the
project. Needless to say, these calls for collaborators had the least success, with
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many positive yet uncommitted replies. In one instance, an unfortunate decision
from the rector’s office at the University of Zurich declared that non-university
related projects could not be hosted within their buildings, which lead them to
drop out in the last month. The only successful collaborator from this method was
Nota Tsekoura, a sound artist and educator involved in a sound art and architecture
research program called Sound Tectonics in Athens, Greece. Both Sound Tectonics
and Tsekoura’s interests overlapped with this project and resulted in an engaging
collaboration.
Many of the potential collaborators that did not participate were those with
whom I had more tenuous personal connections. They also happened to be those
that lived in more culturally and geographically distant locations such as Nairobi,
Astana, Kyoto, Istanbul and Mexico City.
The final list of collaborators;
Ben Purdy,
An interaction designer for Instrument, a Portland based digital creative agency.
Daniel Buckley,
Faculty at MassArt, the only publicly funded art school in the United States.
John D’Arcy,
A friend, sound artist and current PhD student at the Sonic Arts Research Center in
Belfast.
Olan Stephens and Michael Speers,
Friends and MMus Creative Practice students at Goldsmiths University in London.
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Morten Marius Apenes,
A digital creative content producer for Netron, and
Grete Årbu
Curator for Hydrogenfabrikken Kunsthall, a gallery space in Fredrikstad, Norway.
Cory Levinson,
A friend currently working for Soundcloud in Berlin.
Nota Tsekoura,
A member of Sound Tectonics in Athens.
The most difficult and time-consuming portion of this installation was the
logistical side of finding and organising the collaborators. After some initial
prefacing of the installation via email with each collaborator, I Skyped them
individually to discuss the installation in more detail. These Skype conversations
were by far the most effective means of communication as I could answer their
questions rapidly and give concise and clear details. I could also gauge their
interest in the project as well as understand the personality of the collaborator and
how that could determine the nature of our collaboration. While I already had
previous experience working with the collaborators in London and Belfast, and had
met all of the other collaborators in person before, Nota Tsekoura was the only
collaborator that I had not met in person. A quick yet highly productive and helpful
Skype conversation with her established a strong collaborative bond and placed my
trust in her as a pro-active collaborator. In retrospect I believe that if I had have co-
ordinated Skype sessions with those that were close to being involved based on
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previous email correspondences, there would have been more likelihood of them
participating.
A primary concern of the collaborators was finding a suitable venue for the
telephones. Based on previous experience with Leave a Message I suggested
locating the phones in somewhat public locations rather than dedicated gallery
spaces. I described how the ideal location might be along the lines of public
atriums, cafés, libraries, or open workspaces. As a result the venues that
collaborators sourced were on the whole more atypical locations to host artworks,
but were ideal for the purposes of Send a Message.
When the final line-up of locations had been established I finalised the
publicity materials and posted the units. Apart from occasional questions and
suggestions from collaborators, each of them independently secured suitable
venues for the installation and made preparations for the piece. As the units were
being shipped, I provided Dropbox accounts for each of the collaborators that
contained the code and setup instructions. The setup instructions for the physical
assembly of the telephones included a guide on how to hang the telephone from
the ceiling but also suggested they install the telephones in any way they deemed
suitable for their location. In the end this resulted in slight variations in the physical
setup of the telephones in different venues. One such example was the installation
of a telephone in ‘Glyph café and Art Space’, Portland. As Ben Purdy and the café
owners deemed a projection or display to be unsuitable for their location, Purdy
created an Arduino–based interface that would illuminate LEDs based on messages
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arriving from the various locations. Embedded into a solid maple block (fig. 18)
with textual information about the installation, Purdy’s contribution to his portion
of the installation is an example of how collaborators in this project had the
potential to express their personal creativity as well as improve upon the materials
that I had provided.
Figure 18. The telephone holster designed by Ben Purdy
The installation opened informally with Ann Arbor and Boston going online
on April 8th, 2014. Within a week, all of the other locations joined the installation,
which remained active until April 30th.
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Conclusions
Collaboration on the Web
The success of this installation depended heavily on finding collaborators
who would be wilfully engaged in the project throughout. By finding a common
interest group from music technologists, web designers, and interaction designers,
the project appealed to each individual due to the issues surrounding internet
presence and the nature of online communication that pervade each discipline.
Those who have interests in these fields also tend to be creative artistic
practitioners themselves. To further compound their interest and engagement with
hosting this installation, an invitation of creative agency allowed them to express
their personal creativity through the ways in which they exhibited their telephone.
Examples of this include Ben Purdy’s Arduino based LED notification mechanism,
an idea that was incorporated into a later iteration of the visualisations used at
every location. Collaborators in Fredrikstad and Athens also chose to create their
own poster artworks for the installation, expanding on the simple press materials I
supplied. In Belfast, the telephone was hung in the corner of a large white walled
hall. John D’Arcy saw this as an opportunity to creatively position the projector at
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such an angle that he could display two separate visualisations, one for each wall.
By finding collaborators in the field of media arts, they each had prior experience
in audio hardware and software, greatly aiding the setup process for the
installation. Many of them also had no problem accessing not just the physical
hardware that I could not provide (such as a laptop that could be dedicated to the
project for a month), but also access to suitable venues.
Figure 19. The Belfast telephone installation
While distributed authorship of a multi-location artwork can benefit from
the collective creativity of its participants, the sacrifice of individual control can
result in logistical difficulties. Simply co-ordinating this many distinct collaborators
(all of whom did not know each other apart from one pair) was a difficult task
alone. While I dedicated much of my past year to executing this project, I could
not expect the same level of dedication from the other collaborators. It was
unrealistic to expect immediate responses to instant messages or emails in such a
context, as each collaborator naturally had their own unrelated obligations and
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concerns. The line-up of collaborators that I believed to have confirmed to host
telephones 6 months prior to the installation was drastically different to the line-up
of collaborators in the end. For many, the turning point was when I asked for postal
addresses to send the physical units. Up to this point, many of the contacts were
quick to reply and positive in tone. Upon this request, some of the contacts became
hesitant to respond, or disappeared entirely from view. It seems that once
preparations for the installation became a physical reality (i.e. actual components
in a box) rather than simply a concept for an idea that they liked, the necessity to
pro-actively seek out a venue became apparent to them. For many this step proved
too much of an obligation, and they left. There is a natural human tendency also to
leave less important things to the last minute. While this was not a concern for
those that were pro-actively involved in the project, the introduction of some
venues to the installation ended up being much later than planned due to a lack of
preparation.
In order to accommodate the varying levels of engagement from
collaborators, it was vital to create a passive mechanism within the code that
allowed venues to “enter and exit” the installation without disrupting the
installation as a whole. This turned out to be a huge advantage due to building
closures including extended Easter holidays. While ideally the piece would have
featured all venues running throughout the entire period of its installation, various
circumstances resulted in different groupings of locations being active at any one
time.
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The experience of co-ordinating this installation has reinforced for me the
virtues of meeting other creative minds in person, and developing personal
relationships with others located in distant places at any available opportunity.
Despite how a greater proportion of social activity is occurring online, I believe we
are still reliant on face-to-face encounters in the real world for introductory
purposes, before the conveniences of telecommunications can assist in developing
a previously established relationship.
Reflections upon Send a Message
One of the primary goals of this installation was to encourage people to
ponder the nature of instant communication, and perhaps gain a deeper
understanding of their locus on a global scale. In this regard I believe the
installation was a success for those that dedicated time in their interactions with the
installation and were willing to invest into the conceptual aspect of the work. Once
participants realised that they were not going to receive an instantaneous response
due to the delay, many began to consider the locations of the other participants
through their actions and messages.118 It can be a somewhat humbling and isolating
experience to speak and not know if you will be heard. This unintuitive inversion
118 A selection of recordings made of the installation from Ann Arbor’s earpiece over the course of one day is included in multimedia appendix accompanying this thesis.
81
of the telephone interface, which is normally perceived as a direct line to afar, only
enhanced the feeling of distance whilst the visual reference of the map suggested
that you were still connected to these locations despite not receiving an aural
response. For some, this violation of the expectations with the telephone interface
proved a step too far, with some recorded messages expressing frustration or
confusion surrounding a lack of a response.
In proposing this installation to collaborators, I mostly focused on the time-
based conceptual narrative as the appealing aspect of this work. However the most
enlightening experience that arose from this installation was simply the connection
of distant spaces. Whilst removing the delays and having the spaces directly
connected would have resulted in more playful and active interactions, I believe
the time-delays enhanced one’s consideration of the distant spaces due to their
perceived distance. With all forms of telecommunications, the instantaneity of
communication can cause perceived distance to disappear. As established in
conversations with performers from North American Music, the perceived
significance of one’s musical gestures was proportional to the time it would take for
them to arrive elsewhere. This phenomenon was also evident in Send a Message.
Once participants understood the delay in the system, their messages took a
different tone. They began to greater consider not just the locations of the other
telephones, but also their sense of place within the installation. Many cultural
references were made, as if they were sharing information about their area and
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looking to learn more about others.119Much like the care with which mail was
written in the past, the introduction of a temporal resistance in this installation
accrued more conscientious discourse than is often found within modern instant
communication.
The presentation of the work as a public installation was beneficial in
attracting many participants but was also detrimental to the way in which the
public perhaps interpreted the concept. The use of telephones in this installation
were chosen due to prior experience in witnessing how people were willing to
engage with an off-the-hook telephone for reasons of curiosity and familiarity with
the interface.120 While monitoring the progress of this installation, I had the luxury
of listening to the incoming feeds from around the globe via my headphones.
Through this playback mechanism I could clearly hear the ambiences of each
venue ebb and flow as the activity in individual locations varied across each day. I
could spend the morning listening to children running around a tiled floor of a
museum with Northern Irish accents. In the early afternoon it would turn into a mix
of ambient music coming from a reverberant space in Athens, with the occasional
comical guffaw from seemingly always-jovial Norwegians. Later in the day, the
ambience would shift to a steady stream of bean grinders and overlapping
conversations from a café in Portland mixed with the shuffling of feet and shutting
119 Recordings of such messages are attached in the accompanying media for this thesis. 120 See p.43-44
83
of doors in Boston. The delightful nature of these intermingling ambiences was lost
when one listened via the telephone interface.
Through using the telephone interface, I was connecting voices, but not the
environments within which these people exist. In my initial focus, the installation
attempted to greater represent participants’ physical geographies through
introducing the speed of sound as a time-based localisation mechanism. However
by using telephone handsets, which are tailored for the human voice, the
installation ignored the physical acoustic spaces of the venues. While the
telephone was successful in attracting many participants, I had inadvertently
sacrificed an essential component of the concept behind the work.
Through the previous work Leave a Message, I witnessed the effects of the
social environment upon the types of interactions users would have with such an
installation. Leave a Message used a set of 6 or more telephones prompting group
interaction. When interacting with the piece individually, users were conscious of
their surroundings with some of the more interesting messages left when there were
fewer people in their environment. When installed in the gallery space, Leave a
Message changed in tone entirely due to the shift in social conventions within that
space. In contrast, Send a Message only used a single telephone at each location.
This suggested that only one user could interact with the installation from each
location at any one time. I encouraged collaborators to place the telephones in
busy public areas in order to attract as many users as possible. However such
spaces led to users being particularly self-conscious due to the very public nature
84
of their actions. Compounded with the lack of instant response from the
telephones, the experience could be quite alienating for users, thus resulting in
fewer meaningful interactions. Some of the more enlightening interactions came
from groups approaching the telephone and taking turns in speaking and listening.
The confidence gained from being part of a group allowed people to engage with
the installation at a deeper level.
In response to this phenomenon, I feel there are two ways this installation
could have been improved. A telephone booth that demarcates a private social
space could have assisted in easing participants’ self-consciousness. However this
would also have placed a barrier of entry between the public and the artwork,
resulting in fewer users approaching the piece. An alternative would be to
encourage local group interaction. Providing an interface that engages multiple
people at one time, such as using a speaker rather than an earpiece could have
decreased the social apprehension associated with talking to yourself.
During the first few days of the installation, I was concerned that due to the
high level of conceptual engagement required, passers-by who expected immediate
gratification from their interaction with the installation would be disappointed. To
counteract this, I understood that I needed to include some mechanism that would
acknowledge users for going out of their way to interact with the piece. In early
plans for this installation, a receipt printer at each location would have produced a
list of times of arrival for the various locations after one spoke. I believe this system
would not only have provided an instantaneous and playful response, but would
85
have also reinforced the concept behind the piece. Due to the prohibitive costs and
complex nature of receipt printers, this idea never came to fruition. The visual
display used in the final version compensated somewhat for their loss.
From the outset, the visuals would respond to your voice via a pulsing dot
animation atop of your location. However there was no sonic recognition that the
system was even listening. The first change in the audio code was to insert a small
amount of the microphone feed into the earpiece. With this modification, once you
spoke into the telephone, you would your voice in real-time with the filtered effect
of the telephone.
Based on the recommendation from Ben Purdy, I later included an LED strip
on the underside of the display. The brightness of the LED strip was linked to the
amplitude of incoming messages, and also the volume of your voice as you spoke
into the telephone. Not only did this notify you of when a message is incoming, but
it also added another simple and playful interaction for casual participants in the
installation.
In retrospect I believe that the concept would have come across clearer and
have been more engaging if its presentation were more akin to a participatory
durational performance. By having people enter a space dedicated to the
installation, there is a higher expectation that one has a stronger conceptual
understanding behind the environment they are entering. I would estimate from
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monitoring the installation that roughly two thirds of messages spoken in this
installation were greetings such as “Hello, is anybody out there?”121
This is to be expected given the telephone interface, however the
visualisations and brief textual descriptions on screen were quite successful in
prompting users to think about how they might interact across such a medium. On
the first day, teenagers from Boston took turns to ask European telephones various
questions, only to exclaim afterward, “I know you all won’t hear this for hours but
let me know.”122 Others expressed their feelings of connectedness through the
phones despite there being no sound coming from the other ends. On numerous
counts, individuals verbalised math problems, attempting to calculate the amount
of time it would take to hear a reply, taking into account the likelihood of someone
hearing their message based on time-differences and even daylight savings. On
these counts, I personally believe that the installation successfully led users to
question the pace of communications that we are used to today, and how that
influences our interpretation of our place on the planet.
Send a Message as a Commentary on Telematic Performance.
121 Early in the installation I overheard someone ask “Is there anybody in there?”. Whether this was an enlightened insight into the nature of existing within a virtual framework provided by the infrastructure of the network, or simply a misplaced preposition from a non-native English speaker, I will never know. 122 Questions such as “Why do people in London eat snails?”
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This installation owes its origins to criticisms of telematic performances in
which performers attempt to achieve transparent telepresence between venues
despite the impediments of Internet communications including the loss of presence.
By using the speed of sound as the resistance of the medium (rather than the
degradative properties of internet transmission) this piece attempted to subvert the
notion that presence is only achievable through means of immersive representation
and immediacy in transmission. In this installation, the speed of sound presented
the other locations as unique and heightened the relevancy of their geography. This
encouraged participants to contemplate the differences between them and the
distant listeners and spaces. Thus, participants’ interactions resulted in not just a
more engaging narrative but also a palpable sense of presence. While performing
music via the Internet is time-sensitive by nature, I believe this installation
highlights the necessity for practitioners of telematic performance to understand
that presence can be achieved not solely through immersive and immediate
transmission, but through empathy for the distant venues and respect for the
separation that exists between locations.
Future Work
There is fantastic potential for telematics to transform performance,
installation art, and creative practice in general. As with most new technologies,
artworks must first explore the medium before it can mature into a tool that can be
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used for future art making. This installation is just one small attempt to further
explore the capabilities of telematics and communications within an artistic format.
As an artist with access to the resources and infrastructure required to experiment
with telematics, I feel that I am personally charged to experiment within the
medium and potentially influence the artistic considerations of future practitioners.
While I have an aesthetic fondness for telephone handsets and admire their
ability to enact public engagement with interactive art-installations, I believe I will
attempt to use different interfaces that are better suited to connecting environments
and not just voices in future experiments into multi-location telematics. I wish to
further explore connecting physical spaces via telematics and also experiment with
tangible interfaces for live music performance that offer alternative modalities of
non-musical communication between distant performers.
As we continue experiments into telematics in performance and installation
art, I believe the importance of re-situating place to the forefront of our aesthetic
considerations will only enhance the potential of the medium. As occupying space
is the most fundamental proof of existence, we must discover ways in which we
can achieve the fantastic promises of telepresence without ignoring our corporeal
and environmental realities.
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Appendix The CD that accompanies this thesis contains three folders, each containing media relevant to individual projects. These materials can also be found at: http://conorbarry.me/sendamessagemathesis
Folder 1: North American Music NAMTimingAudification.wav An audification of the generative structure the time delays created in North American Music. See page 49 NAM Sampler.wav A short series of excerpts from North American Music.
Folder 2: Leave a Message LeaveAMessageWorkGallery.mp3 Recordings from the Leave a Message installation from the Work Gallery exhibition. LeaveAMessageDuderstadt.mov A video of the Leave a Message installation from the Duderstadt Center exhibition. See page 46
Folder 3: Send a Message Send a Message Code: “AnnArborExampleCode.maxpat” is an example of the final code used in the installation. It depends on the other files within this folder for some of its functionality. “Distance Calculator” is the tool used to calculate the distance and speed of sound between two geographical coordinates. See page 63 Send a Message Media: SendAMessage Examples from April 12th.mp3 contains recordings made on that date of the Send a Message installation. See page 80 Press Materials folder contains various posters and press materials used for Send a Message.
