Squidback unleashes your phone's feedback capabilities!

Video: https://vimeo.com/312155346

A participatory generative and contemplative experience, a collective soundscape without a central preferred point of view, whose sound sources are the audience’s smartphones, turned into feedback generators.

By downloading and running the Squidback App, participants get the sound generation process in their hands. However, the interface doesn’t allow for traditional control paradigms, offering instead only a visualization of the sound process: a Larsen Effect generator with an adaptive filter that works autonomously to help and to keep under control the generative process.

While the app can’t be controlled by an interface, it can be affected by the participants’ movements in the room. The room becomes the interface: the feedback process is in fact naturally affected by the presence and position of people, objects and walls in relation to each device. Focus is thus moved to the collective and relational dimension of this performative installation: people can look for variations by moving through the room and approaching other people and devices.

The experience becomes then a collective exploration of a mysterious space: the room as the space in between people and a non-linear technological process, a space of mutual affections and contemplation, ritualized by the collective generative process, between individuality and collectivity, where everyone is a performer and a receiver at the same time.

I wrote a little paper about it: Read it!