[iippo]: 207.Academic.ReactiveMedia

Reactive Media Project Report
Inari Porkka



My project's idea originated from some of the responses I had on an earlier piece of work that required the viewer to listen to excerpts of text read out loud: several people expressed a wish for a stop- or skip-button. As a listener, I found that quite disturbing but understandable, since not everyone is a listener. So this machine is a reversal of the roles of speaker and listener.

The machine is a hand-drawn Flash animation that operates when it detects sound. The longer there is sound, the more activity the machine has. The sequence it runs through is built in to the machine, but it takes a fairly long time (nearly a minute?) to get through the cycle, and it is made harder by the fact that whenever it detects silence, the machine powers down and you have to start over again. This prototype finishes with the duplication of one of the machine's own components; it reproduces with the speaker's aid. In the next version I'm thinking it will duplicate a number of its own components and then drop them outside the frame of the screen and then pan down to show either a copy of itself - starting the process from the beginning again in a never ending loop), or a different assemblage, "level 2" or the sort (since nothing that reproduces actually makes copies of itself, nothing is the clone of its parents).

I consciously left out sound and colour from the machine. Colour because I'm just more interested in monochrome and scotopic vision (the rod cells in the eyes, night vision). It's not black-and-white, it's black-and-Right-Colour, because of my personal quest for this kind of off-white, old paper, light wood, pale skin, cardboard, dry old asphalt, dead grass -kind of colour that I call the Right Colour (and everything else is the left colour). And I left out sound for artistic and practical reasons: I intend the machine to go across the internet - I want it to be a private experience that people can access from their homes at the time of their own choosing - and sound makes bulky files. Also, nowhere near every time I get online is it convenient for me to have sounds playing at me from the computer - sometimes it's even very irritating. But, having said all that, I haven't quite ruled out the possibility of some kind of subtle sound. It might be interesting to have some onomatopoetic machine-words like "hiss" or "whirr" or "chuckuchuckuchucku". But it would have to be quite limited, because repeated sound drives people crazy faster than repeated images do, and there is a lot of repetition going on in the machine.

Also on a deeper note on sound, I want the user to be the source of sound. The machine is reacting to the sound, but there is no way to tell whether it is really listening (and in fact it's not, it's only hearing). So the machine can't replace a real listener - I like this point because I am a listener and I don't want to be replaced by a machine. Thus, when you talk to the machine alone in private, you are in fact listening to yourself. This applies to all machines we have and use, they become an extension of our body. The computer for example is a prosthetic brain. So using a listening machine helps us to listen, just as using a moving machine like a car or a train helps us move and a memory-machine helps us remember.

Down to technics -wise there is nothing particularly special going on in the project. It is completely done in Flash, scripted in ActionScript, which I did with the usual method: try to get your brain around what you want to happen and explain it to yourself in computerese, then find tips and help on the internet and adapt and join them together until they do what you want the project to do. In the end it is pretty simple - although I did go through a simplification while working; I started out more complicated than I needed. The code has a lot of if-statements and it uses tActionScript's microphone object. The basic is "if there is sound, start timer, if timer is n, play movieclip n, if sound stops, stop timer."

Working onwards from this, I thought of making a slightly differently behaving version - a Finnish version - which would measure the time that sound is being inputted, and then after the sound stops, plays the movieclip, with different kinds of animations for different lengths of input. There is also the possibility of the aforementioned "level 2" or a more complex machine that has an animation for every identifiable soundlevel that Flash can track (which range from 0 to 100).