Interactive Ball Jon Rose Mona Foma Festival 2011

The Interactive Ball appeared for three days at the Mona Foma Festival in Hobart 2011, Australia. Sensors in the ball determine the ball's varied sonic qualities. The hardware and software is developed in collaboration with STEIM Amsterdam. The video was shot from on stage by Jon Rose or in the crowd by Garth Paine.

In recent years, the interactive ball project of Jon Rose has moved from the set art performance to entertaining the psychology of crowd behaviour. Ask a crowd of people if they are interested in trying out an interactive violin bow, and you'd probably just receive blank looks. Most people have never held a violin, let alone undergone the pain and suffering necessary to learn how to play it with a bow: but a ball? Everyone instinctively knows what a ball is, how it works, and what to do.

Cutting an interactive ball loose into an unsuspecting crowd calls into play notions of random, chaos, loss of control. Certainly, there is a fear amongst festival managers that the crowd will become irrational, even violent. In three days of recent Mona Foma performances, only once did a group of kids try to hurl the ball over a fence and into the nearby Derwent River. On another occasion, the wind performed its part, whisking the ball over the top of the stage and into the windscreen of a waiting taxi and dosing driver; shock (to driver as this is Hobart) but no damage. Despite repeated urgings from festival stewards to stop the show, members of the crowd retrieved the ball, game continued, a game with no rules.

In the first 10 seconds of this crowd-ball-composer continuum, the crowd decides how the game should be played. It is suggested that the ball might retaliate if kicked, so they don't do that. They resort to surfing the ball -- and that's it -- they must have seen it on Baudrillard's television. This is what Convergence Theory describes as a "critical mass of like-minded people". Others less generous might presume compliance rather than convergence; there are lots of ways to play with a ball. They are also aware that they play the music of the ball, a music that cannot be categorised in any sense as popular. In fact, no one has ever complained about that. The crowd revels in its ability to punctuate rhythms, spin transpositions, roll out transformations of texture, and shape the very structure of the composition. They accept the premise that if playing with a ball generates music, it can sound like this. More on The Ball Project at:
http://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_ball.html

Category:

Music

Tags:

• music
• electronic
• interactive
• big
• ball
• sport
• crowd
• jon
• rose
• mona
• foma
• australia
• festivals
• anarchy
• sonic
• arts

[muffincheesepie]

i remember when it went ovwer the fence

[christopherowenbrown]

that's hugely and robustly interactive!! bravo

[Rokket]

havin a ball ......