> Sonic Pong (Installation by Time’s Up. Austria)
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Sonic Pong – the way to fall into the machine. On the floor, the bats and balls move as smears of light immaterial, the sounds following them on the speaker array. Manipulating the game sample loops via the sci-fi control panels, the player screeks and scratches their way through an archive of 8 bit game sounds, manipulating them and batting them backwards and forwards with their opponent.
Time's Up's long-standing fascination with the array of games that started this whole thing has led them into many investigations of the prehistory of modern entertainment. The use of whole body interfaces is also a solid basis of the research that Time's Up partakes in that can be tracked through the Hyperfitness Studio or their experiments with Triclops International in CTL98. The interfaces for the control of the bats in Pong.Sonique use the positioning of the body mass and its movement to control the bat's movement.
Numerous studies indicate that sound adds much more to the sense of place in an environment, whether that environment is virtual or real. The movement of the ball in Pong.Sonique is tracked by a speaker array that surrounds the speaker field, increasing immersion in the experience.
The samples sweeping along following the ball position are taken from old(er) computer games. But the sci-fi control panel placed before the players is a control panel for the manipulation of these samples. Manipulating the sample loop in time (pitch and length), space (effect selection) and angle (effect parameters) allows the relocation of the sound to a hyper scientific fifties dimension.
Sonic Pong was premiered at the opening of the Nantes venue Le Lieu Unique as „A game of pong for two digits and a lot of legwork“ at the end of 1999. “Coinslot Ambience” was then presented at the Biomachines minifestival at the Adelaide Festival 2000 in Australia. The most recent presentations were at the 80/81 space in Torino, Italy and the Lyon Biennale “Connivence” in 2001.
Time's Up, founded in 1996 in the industrial harbour of Linz, Austria, defines itself as a laboratory for the construction of experimental situations.
Using haptic, human scale interfaces, Time's Up projects such as the Hyperfitness Studio (a version was presented at the Performance Space, Sydney, in Feb 1999), Sonic Pong or SPIN immerse the public individual in body-relevant spaces.
Perception, Biomechanics and Control being the axes of analysis, Time's Up removes its interests from deep-lying psychoanalysis to an investigation of interaction behaviourism. Celebrating the necessary acknowledgement of the body in all interactions, while using the tools and methods of contemporary virtuality, Time's Up conduct experiments that work on the bridge between the physical and the ethereal, the realm of real virtuality.
http://www.timesup.org/spong