Interactive, generative online application
by LIA & Miguel Carvalhais
Video documentation
Commissioned by
Maclaren McCann Interactive
for the Pontiac Vibe / General Motors, Canada
List of Artists
Randy Knott
Jon Lorenz
Erik Natzke
Joshua Davis
LIA / Miguel Carvalhais
Bradley Grosh
Concept
picking up from some of the features in ENTERTAINMENT we plan to build the tools that lead to the user’s interaction and to the triggering of the generative inter-audiovisual process. there will be a main interface with several (currently 15, but the final number is still undetermined!) buttons. this can be thought as a metaphor for the storage compartments in the pontiac vibe, holding recreational items ready to be used, more specifically maybe, cds. therefore, each of the buttons will be linked to an “entity” that is composed of least two audiovisual components: a visual event (or group of events) and a sound event (or group of events) and a set of behaviors will act upon both – the visual and the audial elements, transforming them and/or conditioning their reactions. this will allow the user, by just clicking on the main button bar, to trigger several audiovisual relations, in each of which the synchresis will exist to a certain extent, providing visualized sounds that will either represent the visual objects or be empathetic with their movements. after the second button is pressed, the user will find out that she can create even more complex experiences by activating more buttons, in each combination she desires, and allowing the different audiovisual processes to be composed in the screen and even to interact with each other (for example, once triggering an action that eventually introduces a change in rhythm, like slowing down or speeding up one movement, either one or more of the present “entities” or all of them can be affected by this change). this will increase the overall complexity of the piece and will bring the level of possible combinations up. however, we will not allow the user to activate all the buttons – remember that we were using the metaphor of the buttons as a container or storage area. as with the vibe and the six cd changer, we will only allow for 6 of the buttons to be active at the same time, forcing the buttons to automatically switch off as the user progresses to the seventh, eight and more clicks. of course that the user is able to switch buttons off if she wishes to. the sounds (acusmatic or visualized) will be distributed in the screen space – again, a metaphor, this time for the six speaker system – creating a more complex spatial sound map. even if the entities developed so far are all rather similar we wish to create a big diversity among the different entities to be presented. these can of course share some characteristics but will fundamentally be diverse. the entities so far (or rather, the 15 variations of the same entity) are inspired on an abstract/romantic idea of a gps navigation map, that leads us (on a mental short-circuit) to the cells in the game of life and other cellular automata, to chart games and maps… a second layer of interaction and a third of complexity will then be achieved by crossing the mouse movement from the user with the behavior of the entities, sometimes allowing for some variables to be linked to the mouse position or speed of movement. the clearing of the screen, that for the time being is defined upon clicking, will probably be also done by a button, because we plan to use the click as yet another interaction method on the generation of the visual-audial end result(s). using the entities we plan to represent/suggest some of the other features of the pontiac vibe, eventually even crossing the line between the areas of interest and going outside of ENTERTAINMENT for it.