Telephone Story at ID/Entity

Our next installation using this technology was a collaboration with the Bay Area video artist J.D. Beltran, called "Telephone Story", which ran as part of an interactive portraiture exhibition called "ID/Entity" assembled by the Media Lab and The Kitchen in New York City (it has been exhibited at both locations). The installation begins with the projection of a large image of J.D.'s bookshelf and desk, accompanied by sound generated through a program written by Nicholas Yu using Perry Cook's Synthesis Toolkit. The sounds, which were all composed from sampled machine voices of answering machines, changed as nearby participants moved about(as measured by a microwave motion detector system). When the screen is knocked, these sounds stop and one of J.D.'s video clips is selected (the bookshelf/desk image is mapped into zones, each of which fire a clip relating to the items that are nearby). The clips feature audio from a message left on J.D.'s machine and associated video sequences. When the window is knocked during clip playback, an image appears at the knock position. The images relate to what's being discussed currently in the clip (they change as the clip progresses), hence the participant is able to explore a background visual layer of content and continue interaction during video playback. These images rotate faster with increasing knock intensity, and when the screen is banged, several images appear and quickly move to the screen's edges. We've posted a Quicktime video clip shot during the engagement of Telephone Story running at the Media Lab and at the Kitchen's gallery.

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