Distributed Presence I & II

In collaboration with David Strang.

Distributed Presence is a networked installation that turns back to composer Jozef Malovec and highlights the ‘golden age‘ of the Slovak electroacoustic music in 1960s and 70s. Malovec together with a sound engineer Peter Janik created in Experimental Studio in Slovak Radio the timeless electroacoustic composition Orthogenesis (1966) in which he used stochastic principle for organising musical material.

This interactive sound and image installation brings together presence and tele-presence, to explore and re-work composition of a seminal Slovakian artist Jozef Malovec. It combines motion-tracking control of this material through granular synthesis within the gallery, with DJing processes of mixing, looping, slicing and manipulation online (thus ‘WebJaying’).

Within the gallery space, the use of motion tracking replaces the time domain of these archival materials with a spatial dimension, encouraging a sense of exploration and physical interaction. The sounds produced in the gallery are streamed online through use of a downloadable MaxMSP application, and in turn this application allows people to mix and manipulate material, in response to these sounds, the results of which are then streamed back into the gallery space to produce a distributed collaborative response to the sounds of the archival material.