On December 4th, 2009 Women in Love opened ITP’s annual Big Screens show, presented at the IAC building in New York City. The piece ran for a little over four minutes and played twice.
Women in Love is an audio and visual collage of women, love, flying, and Sonic Youth. The audience watches and listens to five women as they watch back, as they read aloud, and as they inhabit a world of limitless gravity, multiplicity, and soaring and searing love. Confronted with these larger-than-life women, audience members can choose to call a number and hear one of their stories, chosen at random, more closely. The stories focus on love–romantic, familial, painful, and completely joyous. When they call, a balloon floats onto the screen, hovers for a moment, and floats off as a gentle signifier of the listeners’ presence. After the audience members hears one of the women’s stories, they have the option to leave their own story of love. This new addition to the vault gets added to the mix and a new listener may be presented with this audience member’s story.
Technically, Women in Love runs on three applications. The videos of the women are played through an openFrameworks application. The application listens for OSC messages sent from a Processing application which is, in turn, listening to messages from an Asterisk server. When a listener calls in, the Asterisk server notifies the Processing sketch which sends an OSC message to openFrameworks via the IP addresses of the computers, calling for a balloon to be drawn.
openFrameworks (testApp, center computer):
Processing:
Asterisk:
