[artinfo] Eavesdroplets - Call for Contributions

[Karen O'Rourke]

EAVESDROPLETS - Karen O'Rourke

A project developed in collaboration with Dispatx Art Collective -
http://www.dispatx.com/

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The streets resound with pedestrians chattering to friends or cell 
phones. People are crowding into Internet chat rooms, expounding on 
forums, posting to mailing lists and blogs, while televisons talk 
endlessly. At one time or another we've all overheard exchanges that 
seemed funny, off the wall, premonitory, surrealistic. Often composed 
of very ordinary remarks, their strangeness comes from the way they 
overlap and recombine to a stranger's ears. This random juxtaposition 
can shake tired expressions out of their torpor, metaphors can be 
mixed, reinvigorated or rendered ridiculous.

This project aims at collecting these recontextualized sound bytes 
and using them as starting points for collaborative net-stories. You 
are invited to post your favorite bits of dialog via an online 
questionnaire. You can also use other contributors' eavesdroplets to 
create a short story, an image or a sound file.

To post an eavesdroplet: http://www.dispatx.com/wip/eavesdroplets_form.php

To begin with, both the eavesdroplets and the stories will be posted 
to the Dispatx Art Collective work-in-progress blog. As the project 
develops,the bits of conversation will be mapped into a specific 
relational database. The interface will allow visitors to select and 
display different types of relationships between the entries. They'll 
be able to visualize, for example, all the exchanges taking place at 
a beach, on November 15th or in New York City. Each eavesdroplet can 
lead to one or more stories. Stories can reference any number of 
eavesdroplets (they can be juxtaposed randomly in the manner of 
cadavres exquis). Visitors to the site can consult the map to find 
intriguing eavesdroplets and read the associated stories. They can 
also propose either bits of dialog or completed stories. While the 
eavesdroplets can be uploaded to the site by any human visitor who is 
logged on, stories and multimedia files (images, sounds) will need to 
be approved for publication.

Karen O'Rourke: mapper at wanadoo.fr

Read other eavesdroplets on the Dispatx Art Collective site:
http://www.dispatx.com/wip/?cat=29&more=1&idiom=en&orderby=dt_tm&order=DESC