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GHOST FACTORY, Magda Tyżlik-Carver, Aarhus University & Andrew Prior, Plymouth University

This exhibition creates an environment to experience the divided appeal of technology in popular culture. It arranges people, machines, software, sound and text, in ghostly combinations. Ghost Machine is written in MaxMSP coding environment. It takes PDF documents, still and moving images as source material which the machine systematically scans (or does it read?), outputting red, green and blue pixel values which are routed to three sound-making modules. Two modules map these values onto various musical scales, which are then played in real-time by a sine-wave generator. The last module converts values into raw audio amplitudes, producing unintelligible noises.

The software allows users to control the way in which files are viewed. A green square represents what is being scanned or read at anyone time. Users can choose to control the square by mouse movements, or automate its movement across and down pages. They can choose whether to look at the whole page or the scanned area, or superimpose both on top of one another. This final option creates new audiovisual possibilities as the pixels from the page and close-up can be superimposed on one another in a variety of algorithmic ways - adding, subtracting, or multiplying values—or indeed the plethora of other computational functions offered by the software—changes the visuals, and therefore the sounds which are produced by them. What we hear and see, is a trace of cultural transcoding - media become data, to be re-made and repurposed as the code determines.

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