Audience Words inspire live composition process

SUCCESSFUL PAIRING OF COLLABORATIVE WRITING TOOL WITH COMPOSITION MAKES MAY 16 CONCERT/WORKSHOP SOAR!

Over a period of about an hour, 45 separate individuals contributed the words that inspired a stream-of-consciousness live composition as created and played on acoustic piano by Paul Kwo, (Enniv Zarf in Second Life). The young composer/musician has been the spark-plug behind many innovative artistice projects in second life. Never before (to my knowledge) have any of this projects involved so many collaborators at one time.

A few audience members with slower computers were frustrated by inability to see the words displayed on screen as quickly as they might have wished and some others struggled to discover how to adjust their preferences and controls to play a streamed URL inworld. But most audience members delighted as they saw their shared words fill the screen and the interplay of music and words that made for a meditative stream of collective consciousness.

The beta application http://www.skrbl.com proved to be a good fit for the task of collaborative writing in Second Life in any context, although in pre-concert testing we did note that the draw function was still too slow saving in our trials--too slow for a rapid-fire collaborative arts project in real-time.

On the whole though, this was a successful, leading edge endeavour that suggests further ways of involving audiences in future creative projects.