12-5-2005 was an interactive immersive installation that took place in Holmes Auditorium at Alfred University in Alfred, NY on the fifth of December, 2005. The audience walked through the house seating and entered the stage via stairs at either side of the front of the stage. On stage, they entered an area which was cut off from the audience seating area by a large projection screen. Upstage, opposite the large screen, a cyclorama held three more projected images; two on the bottom and one stacked on the top. The area was large yet confining with its invisible ceiling and darkened backstage areas. Images of the people in the space squirmed on the screens as they were projected and repetitively re-scanned by cameras in the space. Visitors worked to locate themselves in the screens while computer software worked to re-map the information collected by the cameras.
Also in the space was a discarded Coulbourn analog computer that was previously used by a College for research on human and animal behavior. The Coulbourn was used to collect biofeedback information in the form of alpha, beta, theta, and delta waves from visitors as they entered the space. A series of voltage controlled oscillators in the computer created an audio signal that became input for the “first” Macintosh computer in the system. Each Mac was running a specialized program created in MAX/MSP/Jitter. This program used the frequencies of the incoming audio signal as operators in simple mathematical operations that were carried out on the matrix information of each camera input. The computer program resembled the larger system with three matrices being created within each computer and these matrices feeding information forward, all the while looping the information back to the beginning. What was happening was simple math; on or off, + or -, 1 or 2 in logical operations. It was these simple rules applied in overwhelming quantity that created all possibilities.
The audio signal was passed from one Macintosh computer to the next. Each of these computers, running the same program, used this signal to determine mathematical operations for the matrices within that computer. Also at each computer, the audio was output to a discrete channel input of a 5.1 surround sound amplifier which then output each channel to its own speaker. A speaker was located at the base of each corresponding projection, thus providing reference to the biofeedback frequencies used to process the image on that particular screen. Due to the processing of the audio signal by each computer there was a delay between each channel of audio. The result was an audible circling of the sound in the space. A large audio event entering the Coulbourn computer was experienced as circling the space and indicated the direction of information flow within the piece.