A computer controlled spotlight projects a cone of light when a person enters the space. It pulses and flickers based on a person’s distance to the light, emitting a crackling, watery noises as the light changes. The closer to the centre of the light, the more chaotic the sounds become. It is an experiment in making light tangible, through sound.

Here’s a video of the installation in action:

The essence of this piece is a large monolithic dark wall that is represented both in the real and virtual worlds. It is a one-way portal to the virtual world through which people can whisper their thoughts, scream their frustrations and convey regret without the privilege of reply. It is a wailing wall through which to mourn the loss of our humanity to the virtual network.

CATERWAUL is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the Internet. A physical wall in operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds than they do communicating in real life. The cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, transmitted across the Internet and piped out of an “identical” wall in the virtual world Second Life (http://secondlife.com). A website displaying a simulation of the wall allows other people, on the threshold of “real” and “second” life, to vicariously eavesdrop the wailing.

Project webpage: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/caterwaul/

True Blue Love is a mobile phone social networking experience, designed to explore the politics behind intimate phone-based relations.

Inspired by a trip to Tokyo, Japan, the capital city of mobile technologies, I was struck by the ability of the mobile phone to enhance polygamous activity through non-verbal and thus unnoticeable phone text messaging.

True Blue Love is a networked real-time experience which is intended to run in public, social spaces. Possible scenarios would be to have it run concurrent with a cocktail party, book launch, workshop or other such gathering of a variety of people. Alternatively, designated zones could be established throughout the city, encouraging people to run the software in certain areas, increasing the chances of interaction between participants.

Each person is supplied with a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone running custom client software written in the Java programming language. Each participant selects from a predefined list of options
the characteristics of their ideal sexual mate from within the software. While the software is running, every time another phone comes within range, a “love” metric is calculated which is a representation of how close the incoming person matches the participant’s ideal mate. If the match is close, the phone will emit a raucous mating call that will be unique to that participant.

The concept behind the triggered mating calls is to attempt to undermine the silent technology of messaging and email with vocal communication that expresses the user’s desires through a public
broadcast, a broadcast that harks back to more primitive exchanges. The ridiculous sounds should function as social ice-breakers, and the unwilling couple may want to discuss what it is that they have in common that triggered the noise.

A fully functional prototype of True Blue Love was developed for dLux Media Arts and the Mobile Journeys exhibition in 2005 (http://dlux.org.au/mobilejourneys/pierreproske.html).

Project web-page: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/truebluelove/

Synchronised Swamp is an audio-video installation that simulates synthetic frog and insect-like choruses both audibly and spatially using a computer, video screen, multi-channel sound output and distributed speaker system. The software plays back several samples of a synthetic chorusing swamp creature per audio channel, while a visualisation reflects the rhythm on a screen. Each sample is repeated periodically. A mathematical model is then used to bring the collectively sounding samples and visuals in and out of synchrony. As the speakers are distributed in a ring formation, it is possible to walk through the field of chirps and experience the synchronisation from different perspectives. Different frogs/insects will tend to couple more strongly with their neighbours, which produce pockets of synchrony as the population moves towards a common period of calling.

Synchronised Swamp is an example of the use of sound and computer graphics in the mediation between the fields of Art and Science. It is a computer generated simulation of a mathematical model of a phenomenon that recurs throughout the natural world.

Project web-page: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/swamp