Playing instruments is the common lot of music.

Playing with emotions is the common lot of politics and entertainment.

Considering the Net as the World nervous system.

Scanning the Web, we can get a real time image of the world state of mind. Starting with that data, we build up the dynamic maps of the emotions of the planet.

Emotional Traffic is a music/Internet on stage performance in which the world’s emotions are the musical instruments. We (Jean-Baptiste Barrière and Maurice Benayoun) play the maps of the emotions extracted in real time from the Net. On stage a big screen displays the mixing of the maps of different emotions. The maps are built in real time, with words, whose siize correlates with the feed back from the Web. The words come one after another so that the increasing density of terms makes the music more complex. The directors control the speed of different lines (meridians) that scan the screen and the maps of the mixed emotions in the big hall venue. 5 smaller screens, like kakemonos, display the projections of 5 seperate globe-like maps of emotions, from FEAR to SATISFACTION. A meridian line turns around each sphere, scanning the map, building the sound out of the map of the emotion, the musical score. The directors control the speed, the frequency, timbre and the texture of sounds.

A camera analyses the movements of the audience. One sound layer coming from the reading of the maps is a rhythmic component. The component intensifies when the audience movement increases and the component decreases when the audience is static. This feed back loop helps the directors create a reactive music that captures the audience’s attention. In response, the principle gives the audience, by playing with the feed back, the possibility to have some control over the system (move/rhythm loop).

Music composition and software by Jean-Baptiste Barrière

software in co-production with V2 Lab,

Brigit Lichtenegger, Artem Baguinsky, Marloes de Valk

production CITU, V2, Ars Electronica Festival