PlayHead

An architectural-scale music sequencer that runs on three simultaneous text feeds in real time. Playhead does not care AT ALL about “content”, only patterns and coincidences of timing. Viewers may interrupt the automatic feeds with their own text inputs, but may take quite a while to get control of the sound effects they precipitate.

Installation:
One or more walls are filled by a projector, the text feeds sweeping past a cursor at variable speed; synths associated with each row are triggered as they pass the “playhead” in the center. The font is designed to provide for random combinations of one and three spaces, and glyphs three, five, and seven beats long, thus developing a stochastic composition in 4/4 time ad infinitum. The three default text streams are laments on industrial buildings becoming picturesque.

Bio:
Founder Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and Integrated Digital Media Programs at NYU-Polytechnic; Co-founder Gotham Innovation greenhouse; lead, Betaville; 2012 jane Jacobs Medal for Technology and Innovation; multimedia in the public realm.