Title: Analog Information
Type: Computer Installation
Date: 2002

Analog Information is one of the results of a collaboration between Franz Hoffman, Pierre Terrier, Jerome Rigaud and Jürg Lehni for a semester project at the écal on the topic of tonality in written language. It is an installation piece that consists of two computers. The only connection between the two is through their integrated speakers and two microphones, there's no other possibility for them to 'see' each other.

With these reduzed possiblities they have to communicate to each other: One computer reads a text with one of the default MacOS Synthetized voices, the other listens through Philips' iListen voice recognition software. It writes down the text, and as soon as the talking computer has finished, the other reads what it just understood and the one that was reading before is now listening, using the same iListen software.

By doing so, they form an open feedback system, that can be influenced through external influences: A sudden noise or a distant talking person can constantly change the looping text, and even if there's complete silence the text seems to change, mutate and evolve, just due to the analog factors of the microphones, the analog to digital converters and the speakers.

The result is a poetry generation system that works like an automatic téléphone arabe: The well known children game, where the children form a chain in which a phrase passes as whispers from one child's mouth to the other's ear and arrives at the end of the chain in completely mutated form.

In a further step, music was used as input and one of the computers entered a state of écriture automatique, in which it constantly wrote down music. It's probably not astonishing that it seemed to prefer electronical music.

The project involved other work on the same topic, such as the development of the typeface Jawut in various cuts and and the creation of a book that documents the output of the installation.