Becoming - The Examination of a Childhood

This one-man exhibit was shown at the Lyet Gallery, Elizabethtown College, PA from February 11 through March 17, 2000. Viewers, by moving in the room, triggered sensors that generated voices (from a sampler) that spoke to both my specific childhood and raised issues about childhood in general. Viewers created combinations of sounds or single voices, as they navigated the space, often finding places in the installation where they could reflect and consider. When severla people were in the installation, the sound patt erns were denser and more complex.  When one person was in the space, the installation became more personal.  The installation was part of the College's centennial celebration.

This work  used the same general computer-based system as most of my other recent interactive installations. It made use of a program, written by me in Basic, with assembly language subroutines. It ran under DOS since a windows environment is unnecessary. All of the computers and other equipment were hidden from view inside the furniture. The photocells were underneath the furniture and not readily seen. In the picture of the radio, one of the sensors can be seen as the white rounded object at the bottom of the photo. There are four independent computer-based, interactive, sound generating systems, each with its own speaker, in the installation space. Each system had two or three movement sensors that are connected to an analogue-to-digital converter as the input to one of the four computers. The separate program for each system responded to changes in the sensors to which it was connected, by switching to various subroutines. These subroutines sent MIDI signals through the MIDI port, to a sampler and synthesizer. The outputs of these two sources were then mixed, amplified and sent to the one speaker to which they are connected.