Warren Burt

Foto: Warren Burt

Most interactive installations and games try to create a sense of fantasy or personal power in an imaginary world. This installation, on the other hand, tries to represent a reality: the reality of dealing with the bureaucratic, academic, commercial or establishment worlds.
When you enter and leave the room, you break a sensor beam, just as you do when you use an automatic door. This changes many aspects of the music - speed, instruments, ranges, etc. Likewise, when you leave the room, the music also changes. While you're in the room, though, you have no control whatever over the sound. Just like dealing with a bureaucracy or establishment, see? You can change it by joining it, or leaving it, but once inside - it's more powerful than you. Change from the inside, that beloved myth of reformists everywhere, is here revealed as the sham it truly is. Observation and learning remain our only weapons. Further, once you're in the room, the music may be seductive, but it's based chaos, and even though it might sound repetitive at times, its behavior is fairly unpredictable - again, just like a bureaucracy! And to top it all off, the music uses a very strange random tuning system, so that even though it occasionally sounds sweet, or almost normal, it actually has nothing to do with either common sense or everyday reality.
Does this sound familiar?