screenTest (with Keely O'Shannessy) - ACMI - November 2004 | February 2005

screenTest was commissioned as an interactive installation for the Memory Grid at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in November 2004. This version of the project consists of four plasma screens, a surround sound system and a touchscreen and trackball for controlling the interactive. Again the content for the project consisted of some 1200 clips from 100 interviews with members of the general public, carried out at ACMI in April 2004.

Each of these clips is assigned keywords in a database according to topic (eg., "Love", "Dreams, "Anger"), and this is represented (on the plasma screens) as 3D 'bubbles' and (on the touchscreen) as 3D text directly referencing the database keywords. Users can navigate through the 3D space: literally flying through the database.

As various 'bubbles' come closer, the audio associated with them is spatialized through the surround sound system. When a 'bubble', or keywords (as 3D text) is selected, the interactive performs a real-time search on all the keywords of each clip. This is represented by all alike 'bubbles' and 3D text representations bunching together on the plasma screens and touchscreen. When the search is complete, each of the clips associated with the search are played back in sequence, one on each of the four screens until all are played, or the user chooses to return to the 3D space.