Monday, July 19, 2004
Introduction
I was very intrigued when I got wind of the Plum residency announced by the Boston Cyberarts Festival as I had recently completed the first iteration of a new work based on telephony hardware and software. It was with great pleasure that I received the news that I had been selected for the residency.
A number of years ago, when still active as a programmer/consultant, I had engaged in a long-term contract as the chief architect and programmer of a massive telephony system for a major corporation. During that time, I learned a great deal about automated telephone voice systems. For several years hence, I had been deeply considering the possible creative manifestations of telephony technologies, and the skills I had acquired with them. The results of my efforts are piece called Train, pictured below.
Train is a hyper-narrative that takes place on the physical layout of an HO scale model railroad. Controlled via cell phones, viewers guide the trains around the track, picking up passengers along the way. The passengers are familiar characters from well known films. When two or more characters are on board, they begin to have a dynamically generated conversation, overheard on the cell phone.
The trains' cargo are gameboy handheld gaming devices. Rendered in real-time on the screens is the view out of the train window, reflecting the scenery of the model track. This is not merely a "train-cam" mounted to the engine, it is an internal, software rendered 3d mesh "model" of the model railroad world, kept in synch with the "real" world of the railroad layout as the train travels around the track. Also appearing on the gameboy/trains are the passengers, characters from famous films. I painstakingly extracted from rented videos, 800 clips of audio dialogue, classifying each clip according to it's traits, such as a question, a disagreement, a statement of compassion, etc... I also created a "personality profile" based on the character to whom the statements belonged. I then programmed a "conversation engine" (pun intended), that, depending on who was on board the train, generated a dynamic conversation between the characters. The viewer, by using their cell phone, would guide the train around the track, stopping at different locations to pick up and drop off the characters.
I originally developed the telephony back-end using inexpensive voice-modem cards. This approach, though not without a certain charm, had severe limitations in both user interaction and feedback, and the physical control of the track. Having access to the Plum Voice Portals systems enables all manner of possibilities for interaction and control. Plum has an intriguing system, offering a number of features such as text-to-speech and voice recognition, the ability to allow a far greater number of people to dial the system and participate, the ability to make outgoing calls, not to mention a far more rigorous control over the call flow and subsequent switching of the track system. The Plum system, by nature, is a web enabled system, meaning not only can I modify and maintain the source code remotely, but also viewers on the web, not in the physical location of the track, can be incorporated into the work. I hardly know where to begin in re-working the piece with this new back-end, and in all likelihood, the piece will evolve into a very different experience than its current form.
At this point, it is my intent to employ the same physical layout of the first iteration. I put a great deal of consideration into the best possible track layout to accommodate an exhibition space, the flow of visitors around the track, the ability for them to follow the trains, the spacing between stations, not to mention the effort involved constructing the detailed scenes of the layout, each reflecting scenes from the films the characters are portrayed in. I am very pleased with that aspect of the piece. The realm in which I will endeavor to enhance involves the aforementioned superior technological architecture of the Plum portal, not in terms of bells and whistles (pun intended again, trains are ripe for word-play and metaphorical reference) but as a means to resolve some very curious problems of human nature I encountered once the piece was put on view to the public.
It was with shock and horror that I witnessed countless viewers take their phones, point them at a train, and start pressing buttons - as if their phone had somehow re-configured itself as a TV remote. It seemed that the connection between a model train and a telephone was so tenuous that the intuitive impulse was to employ the phone in a manner completely foreign to it's nature, rather than assuming that it actually is perfectly natural to control a train through conversation (not to mention the fact that perhaps listening to the voice on the phone might provide insight into handling this mildly awkward disjoint).
To me however, and indeed a major premiss of the piece, is the very real and clear technological and historical connection between the railroad and the telephone. These technologies "grew up" together, shared advancements in terms of switching, relay, and scheduling systems, and were used in conjunction, originally via the telegraph, to produce the unified control systems we enjoy today. The railroad, the telegraph, telephone, electronic computers, and finally mobile phones and hand-held game platforms all share a common technological thread, more like a rope really, that binds together the innately human desire to communicate, and oddly, our unusual desire to create and experience our world in a "virtual" form - be it with papier-marche and lichen, or LCD's and software.
In all fairness to the TV habituated viewers, many years passed before the railroad companies and the telegraph companies worked together. At first they were at odds - sharing the same "right of way," the railroad companies were angered by the constant hassles and delays caused by downed telegraph cables entangleing their locomotives, and conversely the telegraph companies were plagued by the dangers of fixing said downed cables with locomotives lumbering past at break-neck speeds, with little clearance between man and machine. Thankfully, another necessity stepped in. The early railroad was a very dangerous form of transportation - there were frequent fatal collisions, both head-on and rear-end. Finally, a reasonably bright person put two-and-two together and realized the telegraph was the perfect device to enable scheduling and monitoring of the trains, notifying stations of their progress and position, modifying timetables in "real-time" resulting in a dramatic decrease in human fatalities, not to mention "loss of investment." So perhaps, what at that time did not appear obvious or intuitive, does not appear so today. Perhaps the ethereal, disembodied nature of instant global communication clouds our consideration of it's agency in a physical realm. I trust that if you have read this far in a rather lengthy blog post, you will suffer me waxing philosophical.
John Klima
New York
19 July 2004, 2:02 AM
