A Tele-Immersive Collaboration

Synthecology combines the possibilities of tele-immersive collaboration with a new architecture for virtual reality sound immersion to create a environment where musicians from all locations can interactively perform and create sonic environments.

Compose, sculpt, and improvise with other musicians and artists in an ephemeral garden of sonic lifeforms. Synthecology invites visitors in this digitally fertile space to create a musical sculpture of synthesized tones and sound samples provided by web inhabitants. Upon entering the garden, each participant can pluck contributed sounds from the air and plant them, wander the garden playing their own improvisation or collaborate with other participants to create/author a new composition.

As each new ’seed’ is planted and grown, sculpted and played, this garden becomes both a musical instrument and a composition to be shared with the rest of the network. Every inhabitant creates, not just as an individual composer shaping their own themes, but as a collaborator in real time who is able to improvise new soundscapes in the garden by cooperating with other avatars from diverse geographical locations.

Virtual participants are fully immersed in the garden landscape through the use of passive stereoscopic technology and spatialized audio to create a networked tele-immersive environment where all inhabitants can collaborate, socialize and play. Guests from across the globe are similarly embodied as avatars through out this environment, each experiencing the audio and visual presence of the others.

Participants from the WWW use a browser interface to contribute sound elements to the garden environment for use as compositional items. All the while, this real-time composition is streamed through web broadcast of the virtual environment to illustrate the audio-visual transformation of the garden. Broadcast throughout the entirety of the festival, Synthecology will celebrate the possibilities of collaboration, improvisation, and distributed authorship that exist on the horizon of an increasingly interconnected world.

As current advances in networking become commonplace, the creation of collaborative environments connecting remote individuals will become less involved. By augmenting the possibilities for users to share sensory presence through tele-immersive interfaces, Applied Interactives intends to combine the possibilities of real-time collaboration and socialization with the dynamics of digital creation and manipulation. Synthecology is a speculative glance at how the technology of today may be utilized to create new autonomous zones for sampling & re-mixing culture.

COLLABORATORS

Synthecology is being created as a collaboration of students and faculty from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago, and art(n) through the Applied Interactives organization.

ABOUT APPLIED INTERACTIVES

The purpose of Applied Interactives, NFP is to educate the art and science community about the medium of Virtual Reality as an interactive, computer-generated, immersive computer graphics environment. Applied Interactives, NFP plans to advance the medium through research and experimentation as well as provide a bridge to bring the technology out of institutional labs and into more publicly accessible arenas. Applied Interactives, NFP intends to propagate the medium by providing support and direct access to the resources necessary for artists and scientists to exhibit and develop works in the medium.