portfolio: 'Relative Touch'
Experimental piece consisting of multi user files accessed via a University server. Users control their own 'instruments', which could be either the sounds of 'Violins' or choral 'Voices'. The presence of a user is indicated by the rollover activation of a video symbolising a touch. Hotspots are hidden but because they are located in the same places in both windows, users can help each other locate the hotspots. Users not only communicate via 'music' by combining their relative 'instruments', but they can also help one another to find the hotspots and therefore gain more from the experience by working together. If both users touch a hotspot at the same time, the overlapping videos produce a visual effect similar to a pulse and their sounds activate simultaneously. This produces a 'relative' touch which plays on the 'Einstein' sense of the word (in that it extends across time and space).