This performance is a live, interactive, new media and sound piece that addresses issues of identity, intimacy, and the technologically mediated body. The three-hour piece places viewers and performer in an unfamiliar and rigorously defined social logic that disorients them while inspiring curiosity to learn what precisely is going on. Two charts on the floor are composed of white gaffer’s tape with white, laser-cut, wooden symbols and are used for collecting data from the audience. Against one wall is a chair with a silver stopwatch and a custom-printed notebook for recording the data. Across from the chair is a pedestal with a stack of note cards featuring instructions on how to speak. I mark viewers’ feet with gaffer’s tape and time how long the marked foot stays in place on the floor. I then use that time measurement to perform a calculation that helps select a single instruction card describing how to speak.

The second chart has a chair with a chalk line tool attached to it and a tape measure. When a visitor enters this space, I mark their foot position on the floor. I then extend the chalk line tool to make a white line from the center of the chair, through the chart, to the tape mark. I then take three measurements marked by intersections of the chalk line and the grid lines of the chart. I wash my hands and perform calculations to produce three values.

I then walk to a desk, enter the three parameters that will change the sound of my voice, consult the note card that tells me how to deliver my speech, and read a passage presented by a computer. This voice recording is then processed and played back into the space and several different versions of the recording are saved to an archive. This growing archive of voice recordings is then accessed by an Xbox Kinect that uses motion and depth data from the audience to select an audio file and to play it back in one of the four speakers in the gallery.

I refrain from engaging in eye contact with viewers and to refuse to interact with them in a way that I might in daily life. The result is that the social system I had created was the medium through which we established a connection, albeit a distant and alienated one.