Women in Love is an audio and visual collage of women, love, flying, and Sonic Youth. Women in Love celebrates the joy and excitement and horror and absurdness of being in love. 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.
In this web version, the audience has the opportunity to not only experience a more intimate relationship with the characters and their stories, but also participate by leaving their own stories and songs pertaining to these ideas of love.
A visitor arrives at the website and is met with characters inhabiting a world and watching back at the her. She has the opportunity to call in and hear one of the stories the characters have to tell. In this version of the project, the visitor can also leave her own story. Her recording is added to the mix of stories and might get heard by another visitor.
There is also a soundtrack for the site. I would like for the music to be a collection of both curated and contributed music. When I was collecting text for the performers to read, I realized how influential music is when talking about love. As often as a poem speak to this feeling, a song can also best capture the feeling. Visitor can upload a song that speaks to them and it will, like the stories, get added to the mix and be played as a radio playlist.
Although the applet isn’t robust enough for distribution, I was able to bring over the balloon element from the Big Screens version. When a visitor calls, she sees a balloon float up the screen as a symbol of her participation. Eventually, I would like to create the balloons as shared objects so that visitors can see not only their own but also all others’.
The asterisk conference code is listed below. A caller is presented with a pre-recorded story at random and, if she chooses to leave her own story, that recording is added to the possible choices.
The Asterisk server talks to a Processing sketch, pasted below. In the Big Screens version, this sketch then sent OSC messages to an openFrameworks sketch which played the movie. On the web, I was able to take out that step and consolidate the information to the Processing sketch alone.
Finally, to implement the dynamic broadcast, I wrote an Actionscript application that finds uploaded .mp3s and plays them in the order of upload. With each upload (which I used an example to create), the page refreshes and it turn refreshes the playlist, creating a radio-like broadcast of the collected love songs.
A huge thanks to Shawn Van Every and Daniel Shiffman for all their patience and help.
