Compose, sculpt, and improvise with other musicians and artists in an ephemeral garden of sonic lifeforms. Synthecology invites visitors in this digitally fertile space to create a musical sculpture of sythesized tones and sound samples provided by web inhabitants. Upon entering the garden, each participant can pluck contributed sounds from the air and plant them, wander the garden playing their own improvisation or collaborate with other participants to create / author a new composition.

As each new “seed” is planted and grown, sculpted and played, this garden becomes both a musical instrument and a composition to be shared with the rest of the network. Every inhabitant creates, not just as an individual composer shaping their own themes, but as a collaborator in real time who is able to improvise new soundscapes in the garden by cooperating with other avatars from diverse geographical locations.

Virtual participants are fully immersed in the garden landscape through the use of passive stereoscopic technology and spatialized audio to create a networked tele-immersive environment where all inhabitants can collaborate, socialize and play. Guests from across the globe are similarly embodied as avatars through out this environment, each experiencing the audio and visual presence of the others.

Participants from the WWW use a browser interface to contribute sound elements to the garden environment for use as compositional items. All the while, this real-time composition is streamed through web broadcast of the virtual environment to illustrate the audio-visual transformation of the garden. Broadcast throughout the entirety of the festival, Synthecology will celebrate the possibilities of collaboration, improvisation, and distributed authorship that exist on the horizon of an increasingly interconnected world.

As current advances in networking become commonplace, the creation of collaborative environments connecting remote individuals will become less involved. By augmenting the possibilities for users to share sensory presence through tele-immersive interfaces, Applied Interactives intends to combine the possibilities of real-time collaboration and socialization with the dynamics of digital creation and manipulation. Synthecology is a speculative glance at how the technology of today may be utilized to create new autonomous zones for sampling & re-mixing culture.

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