Art Hack Weekend: San Francisco 2012 — The Debut Of Partyline
As a wrap up to #DIGART week, we’re very pleased to debut one of the works that was created during our two-day art hackathon in March, organized in collaboration with Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA).
Inspired by our first Art Hack Weekend in New York, two weeks before The Creators Project: San Francisco 2012, we brought together some of the Bay Area’s best creative coders with the shared mission of developing the next phase of cutting edge artistic web apps using HTML5 and WebGL.
We picked two winners and one honorable mention to receive development stipends and the chance to exhibit their works-in-progess at our San Francisco event. The first work we’re releasing online is the hackathon’s honorable mention (and arguably the most subversive project in the bunch!), Partyline, created by Casey Rodarmor, Brandon Liu, Elle Sakamoto, and Angelo Hizon.
The work is a two-part project that draws upon the most private of our communication methods—our phone conversations—and assembles them into an involuntary sound collage. The first part—”Voyeur,” sources phone numbers listed publicly on Craigslist, dials them at random and places the people or machines on the line into a conference call together. (Don’t worry, it’ll only dial a certain number once, then never again—the number will be permanently blacklisted). The Partyline team staged this portion of the project as an intermittent performance that ran on the hour at our Fort Mason event.
The second part— “Sequencer” (the part you see online), assembles recorded sound clips from those involuntary conference calls and turns them into musical fodder. Users pull up the colorful phones to activate their individual soundtracks, creating a kind of sound collage that is sure to impress the likes of Scanner and other experimental sound artists. It’s an interesting look into what private conversations look like, as Liu explains in the behind-the-scenes video above.
