Sosolimited, “ReConstitution”

from REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory

Remixing an election campaign?

Information aesthetics opens up new doors. Databases and their data, the truly contemporary and future gold and oil, are fetish, tools for entertainment, control, fear and emotion. Percentages constantly scroll through our fields of vision and hearing; the results of processes that interpret the ups and downs of stock markets, weather forecasts, sequences of colors in the fashion business, trends on the number of aesthetic surgery in the last decade, unemployment rates, sexual habits. Continuous representation, synthetic and sensorial of all the information around us: an imprescrutable sensorial jump into the realms of data and discourses.

Here politics mix to poetry. The USA election candidates become the object of a maniacal analysis: every one of their words gets detached, measured, cataloged, drawn, recombined. The image of the candidate itself becomes the tool to show the fetish: information, analysis, observation. Informational, recombinant and voyeuristic fetish. Visual cultures and interactive computational poetics.

From the authors:

"ReConstitution was a three-part live audiovisual remix of the 2008 presidential debates. A hybrid of video art and public service, the piece represented a shift away from the polarized manner in which people approach political artwork.

The artists designed a piece of software that allowed them to sample the television broadcast in real time, extracting the video, audio, and closed captioned text. The software consisted of a series of modes, each of which transformed, analyzed, and reassembled these pieces in a distinct way. The transformed visuals were projected into a large screen and the audio was played through a PA system.

Aspects of the broadcast were obscured while others were highlighted and analyzed, all intended to augment the raw information contained in the television signal. A clean version of the candidate's voices was always present in the audio mix, so as to maintain the legibility of the debates.

Every word spoken by the candidates was cataloged, analyzed, and displayed, integrated with the transformed video signal. The visuals would react to the physical movement of the candidates as well as the words they spoke."

Sosolimited

ReConstitution 2008