Paper short abstract:

Political Entertainment: The Communicative but Remove Yourself Show is a prototype of a playback device for sonic or visual material. In this software-like interactive installation, sounds drive the images and the images compose the sonic experience.

Paper long abstract:

Political Entertainment: The Communicative but Remove Yourself Show (PE) is a playback device for sonic or visual material. This version contains two trailers and database footage of a documentary about homelessness in Edinburgh, UK. In this interactive installation, sounds drive the images and the images compose the sonic experience.

PE attempts to challenge the theoretical methodologies concerned with using sound and visual technologies to unfold 'real life' in new media databases and interactive environments (Manovich 2001). This project examines software use, user driven narratives and user intentionality in the articulation of the sonic/video narratives that derive from the experiences recorded in the field.

This player was built on MAX/MSP, and contains videos about utopian housing and homelessness in Edinburgh, and 'left-over' clippings of interviews I did with both homeless persons in Edinburgh and administrative staff of one Edinburgh's Salvation Army shelters. The interviews deal with some illustrative points about homelessness, and with the potential benefits of creating a website which the homeless of Edinburgh could use to communicate with each other. This project tries to understand how 'real' content like homelessness could inhabit a virtual space built in new media.

The sounds on this piece are the stories I recorded whilst carrying out the interviews; and sounds from the streets of Edinburgh, mixed live with randomly triggered FM synthesis sounds