The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether
by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk)
with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State
Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have identical performance / composition programs -- a custom flexible step-sequencer -- that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators.

Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development. During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their histories — past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland. [Needs Flash Player and audio]

Experiments in Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) using two reel-to-reel machines in an attempt after Konstantin Raudive & William Burroughs to establish contact with the dead. In the 21C electromagnetic tape is an anachronism. Dead media unwinds time from its spools. The dead are no longer human; and when the inhuman expire, do the inhuman become more human than human, at the moment of death? Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Two tape machines in tandem share their memories, silent at first but slowly amplified through continuous re-recording & simultaneous playback. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency.

Quiet time, dead time, free time — call it what you will, there seems to be less and less of it. What do people give up in the race to maximize every second of their waking life? What kinds of activities are replaced by the panicked drive for efficiency? No Time Machine explores these questions by mining the Internet for mentions of the phrase I don't have time for and variations such as You can't find the time for and We don't make time for. Based on a set of procedures they’ve set up, a program analyzes the search results and reconstructs them into a poetic conversation. Interwoven with this "found poetry" generated by the program are sentences that they re-contextualized themselves; a human-computer collaboration that expands the field of creative writing to include networked and programmable media. [Needs a Java-Enabled Browser]