These days, aren’t we are all alone in a room? Our communication–what makes us human–is mediated through a substrate of bits, waves, and networks. These systems translate and transcode our faces, our speech, our affect. And the translation is imperfect! Its encoding is incomplete! It carries latency! When our humanity is quantized, measured, made legible to the machine, we strip away its complexity and nuance. We use media that limits our emotions to “like” and “dislike”, “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”: conforming the richness of our spirit into schema and structure.
And yet, these same systems enable so much: we can communicate (however mediated) across space. We can form communities of interest, we can collaborate, we can play. Consumers become producers. We are all agents of cultural production: discovering, forking, contributing, remixing, archiving. With all this creation, the artifacts of our culture drag a complected web of provenance, layers of meaning translated through time, alternately accreting and shedding. Ideas and memes pass through our culture like a game of telephone, transcoded at each step.
Life Online explores these themes through the lens of piano music. We present our audience with a mediated interface to a disklavier piano: a handful of keys. Our players, geographically and temporally distributed, participate through this interface, collaboratively playing and recording a piano score. Our playing fleetingly becomes physical on the disklavier, but this is just a single moment: no human can hear it before it is captured again, transcoded into a digital audio-video, and relayed back to us through a corporate streaming platform.