in|fibrillae

For more information, please see project documentation. Minimum browser requirement: Firefox 79, Chrome/Chromium 68. Firefox 88 or newer recommended. Mobile phones currently not supported.

in|fibrillae is a reconfiguration of an audio-visual installation into the online browser space. It is loosely based on a previous piece in|filtration, unravelling it into hundreds and thousands of small fibres, in order to transpose the original materiality for a personal space.

The piece is about exchange between otherwise disconnected and “uncommunicative” segments, departing from forms of spatiality: the distinction between a common space and an individual (or inner) space. The common is a repertoire of shared topological forms for sound structures. It is individuated through automatically programmed synthetic sounds, yielding the distinct corpora of virtual sub-spaces. The pure sonic layer is complemented by a layer of animated digital image and text fragments. The images are based on wax paper prints taken from cut tree branches in Caracas, and the bulge that the trees regrow around the cut producing a visible boundary surface. Each sub-space corresponds to a poem, a set of words that belong together. They appear in permutations inside the trunk drawings.

Several variants are part of the piece, forming “layers” arranged in a carousel like manner. You can move around the virtual space with the mouse, or when inactive let a digital agent wander around, thus exploring the space and reshaping the poems and sound. When a red word appears, the carousel moves to the next sub-space. We deem the piece in-progress, since some elements that we consider have not yet been explored or implemented: there are currently three sub-spaces (we aim for six), and a reverberant “shadow” of neighbouring sub-spaces is envisioned.

in|fibrillae was presented at the 9th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X (xCoAx), and is described in its proceedings.

Press the Start button to begin. It may take some time until you hear the first bleeps and noises. If the microphone is enabled (default), be aware that feedback sounds may occur. Privacy note: The piece runs purely within your browser/computer, no data or sound is transmitted to any server. Please feel invited to keep the page open while turning to other activities on your computer. While the work is marked as in-progress, if you revisit this page, please purge the cache and explicitly reload (ctrl-R) the page in the browser, as there might be updates. Thank you!

Also note that sound may be choppy sometimes, it seems the current web audio implementation comes to its limits. This happens for example on Chromium 90 Linux. We are planning to address this, and also to release a desktop downloadable version of the piece.

The piece released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. The underlying software released under AGPL and GPL licenses. The font is Voltaire-Regular by Yvonne Schüttler, released under Open Font License. Please refer to the source repository.