The main goal of ReaCT is to provoke the ReaCTion of the viewers and listeners, letting them participate.
ReaCT stands for ReaCTion, because I tried to make it highly interactive, and RECT, which is the only graphic structure that appears in the experience.
I used rectangles because this is the simplest graphical structure that can be managed by a computer, and I wanted in some way to minimize the graphic design. For the same reason I have used only black and white images, leading to the maximum graphic simplicity I could achieve.
For the interactive aspects I tried to reinforce the speed, movement, trajectories and behavioural movements of the objects.
ReaCT is a collection of experiments that I have done, and I’m still doing, over the last months, linked together in order to give some sort of narrative, letting the user explore and experiment with the ReaCTion in the populations of the mouse moving or clicking. This is why it may, in some ways, be considered as a game.
Following an explanatory introduction, the piece is a series of different 800x600 screens inhabited by rectangles of different sizes and proportions, always forming some type of organisation, ReaCTive to the user input.
There are five phases triggered by time. In the first phase it is the keyboard input which organises the rects on the screen following what you type. In addition, the mouse moves the rectangles as through they were floating on water. In the second phase there are only two rectangles, but they seem to be linked with a gum, bouncing all the way. In the third one, there is a chaotic structure where the stiller the mouse is, the more chaotic the result. The fourth works as a galactic aspirator, and the last one is a huge panoramic of squares. But the most important aspect here is that people must experience by themselves, and interpret what are they playing and/or looking at.

The music is very important, and helps to create the ambient of the “rectangle world”; all the music and the sound effects are created with the FMOL software (http://www.iua.upf.es/~sergi/FMOL/Project_Description.htm), created by Sergi Jordà. It is especially suitable in this case, because it’s a very synthetic music, the same way as rectangles are very synthetic forms.

All the programming is done with lingo (Shockwave), using a very small amount of resources: the amount of bytes downloaded are mainly sound and music, the rest is only about 20 Kb for the whole story.

Links: http://www.iua.upf.es/~dani/react

Credits:
Idea and programming:
Daniel Julià Lundgren
www.iua.upf.es/~dani
Music and sound
software: Sergi Jordà

Thanks to:
Maite Fez
Cristina Casanova
Sergi Jordà
Antoni Abad
Roc Parés
Iñigo Aramburu

Daniel Julià Lundgren (ES) graduated in Telecommunication Engineering in 1993 from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. Expert in interactive systems programming since 1993. From 1994 to 1995 he worked in the R&D department of a multinational company developing object oriented interfaces for medical care management. He joined the Mulitmedia Lab of the IUA (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) in late 1995, where he has worked as technical supervisor and programmer in several productions. His teaching responsibilities in the Master of Digital Arts (IUA) are focused on programming and multimedia production. He has taught in other masters programs in the area of new technologies. He is preparing his PhD in Audiovisual Communication (UPF) in the field of new technologies.