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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Dialtones
Golan Levin
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"Dialtones" is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience s own mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant s mobile phone can be known in advance, "Dialtones" presents a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures. Moreover, by directing our attention to the unexplored musical potential of a ubiquitous modern appliance, „Dialtones“ inverts our understandings of private sound, public space, electromagnetic etiquette, and the fabric of the communications network which connects us.
"Dialtones" premiered in two consecutive concerts at the Linz Brucknerhaus on the 2nd of September, 2001, as a co-production of Golan Levin and the 2001 Ars Electronica Festival.
"Dialtones" begins with a brief preparation phase prior to its performance, during which the members of the audience register their wireless telephone numbers at a cluster of secure Web kiosks. In exchange for this information, the participants receive seating assignment tickets for the concert venue, and new ring tones are then automatically downloaded to their handsets. During the concert itself, the audience s mobile phones are brought to life by a small group of musicians, who perform the phones en masse by dialing them up with a specially designed, visual-musical software instrument. Because the audience s positions and sounds are known to the "Dialtones" computer system, the performers can create spatially-distributed melodies and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena, like waves of polyphony which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures, moreover, are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers interfaces. Towards the end of its half-hour composition, "Dialtones" builds up to a remarkable crescendo in which nearly two hundred mobile phones ring simultaneously. It is hoped that the experience of "Dialtones" can permanently alter the way in which its participants think about the cellular space we inhabit.
Golan Levin (USA) is interested in creating artifacts and experiences which explore supple new modes of nonverbal expression. He is a recent graduate of the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied with John Maeda in the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Prior to MIT he worked at Interval Research Corporation on the design of tools and toys for multimedia play and production.