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10419 Sosolimited – reConstitution [Profile, Events, c++]

Sosolimited is an art and design consultancy formed in 2003. The group specialises in interactive installation and audiovisual performance. They create immersive works that play on the immediacy of live media. I had a pleasure of hearing Sosolimited speak at the recent OFFF conference and with some scepticism of their more recent commercial work was very fond of the work they’ve been doing in the area of live media. Their presentation was focused on the evolution of their live media project – reConstitution, describing different iterations of the software created to allow real-time interpretation of live television. More of an outsider view than creating an impact, Sosolimited acts as a mediator with their software capable of extracting and reformatting information from live TV. Of course, this at times creates new narratives that do not necessarily represent the discussion at hand nevertheless they allow for a new way of understanding, selecting and reinterpreting voice, sound and image. The new meaning is left over to the spectator to contextualise, compare, make sense of or reject all together.

The kicked off back in 2004, named reConstitution, it was a three-part live audiovisual remix of the US 2004 presidential debates. A hybrid of video art and public service, the piece represented a shift away from the polarized manner in which people approach political artwork. Sosolimited designed a piece of software that allowed them to sample the television broadcast in real time, extracting the video, audio, and closed captioned text. The software consisted of a series of modes, each of which transformed, analyzed, and reassembled these pieces in a distinct way. The transformed visuals were projected into a large screen and the audio was played through a PA system. Some aspects of the broadcast were obscured while others were highlighted and analyzed, all intended to augment the raw information contained in the television signal. A clean version of the candidate’s voices was always present in the audio mix, so as to maintain the legibility of the debates. Every word spoken by the candidates was catalogued, analyzed, and displayed, integrated with the transformed video signal. The visuals would react to the physical movement of the candidates as well as the words they spoke.

In 2008, once again for the new wave of presidenial debates, Sosolimited organised three performances in three cities (ReConstitution2008), each coinciding with the live broadcast of the debates. The software was redesigned to further enhance the translation. Through a series of visual and sonic transformations the team reconstituted the material, revealed linguistic patterns, exposed content and structures creative alternative understanding of the debates while they were being watched. Over 1500 people attended our three performances in Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. See more images/videos here.

In 2010, their longest performance to date (the long conversation); nine hours, was held during the Transmediale Festival in Berlin at the Haus der Kulteren der Welt. The performance occurred in parallel with the “Futurity Long Conversation”, which was a nine hour lecture and debate series involving 21 speakers in an auditorium. There were two speakers on stage at a time, with one of them being swapped out for another every 20 minutes. On a separate stage at the opposite end of the HKW the team had typists transcribing the words of all the artists, designers, and authors who were speaking, and sent the text streams to the analysis software. The visualizations of the conversations were projected on the screen behind the typists. The words of all the participants were matched to lexical databases, and sorted by topic, tense, and certitude. Soso displayed realtime statistics of all the speakers and used a dozen or so different transformational modes throughout the night.

Most recent iteration of Sosolimited’s software was for 2010′s UK Parliamentary elections which included American style live debate between the party leaders. Having enjoyed the US Debate remix, ReConstitution, the organizers of the FutureEverything festival in Manchester invited Sosolimited to do something similar for a live audience in the UK. With fully integrated LIWC text analysis libraries to track things like emotion and self-reference in our software, the show was streamed live on TV, a first for the team, on April 29th – Prime Numerics.

Whether the project creates an insight into what the world leaders “mean” is somewhat debatable. Extracting words out of their context and interpreting facial expressions may only begin suggest new narratives disconnected from their origin. The fact of the matter is that most of these political debates are no more than theatre, created for public and press media to feed on. The truth is that we, without the additional software, create meaning depending on our social standing, education and what might be most relevant to us. Sosolimited’s segmentation nevertheless does provide an insight into how machines interoperate  live television but whether we can relate to these machines is altogether another matter. What is true, shown here, is that popular media is a spectacle that should be celebrated whether this be in the form of entertainment, critique or even a new form of self discovery.

Made with ACU, a C++ MIT library / openGL.

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• Author: Filip

  Architect, Lecturer and New Media Technologist. Based in London and Berlin.

  
  URL: http://www.fvda.co.uk
  View all entries by Filip

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