United Kingdom

"Bicycle Built For Two Thousand" (2009) is an online work by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey.

The work is the product of 2000 people around the globe working together, although none of them knew about it.

The project includes 2,088 voice recordings collected through Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service.

Hired workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip and then they had to record themselves imitating with their own voice what they heard. 

Put together, these thousands of samples recreate “Daisy Bell”, a popular song from late 1800s.

Why this song?

The song "Daisy Bell" originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, was made famous in 1962 by John Kelly, Max Mathews, and Carol Lockbaum as the first example of musical speech synthesis.

In contrast to the 1962 version, "Bicycle Built For Two Thousand" was synthesized with a distributed system of human voices from all over the world.

The aim was to use countless human voices to create something digital.

How did it work? The workers involved completed their task in a web browser, through a custom audio recording tool created with Processing.

They were not given any information about the project.

The pay rate for each recording was $0.06 USD.

In total, people from 71 countries participated. The top ten were the United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, Macedonia, Philippines, Germany, Romania, Italy, and Pakistan.

Source: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/info.html

USA-based computer engineer and innovator PJ Sanders returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda: to close the place down and sell it. But not before he employs an experimental device he’s been working on, primed to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood.

(Source: Author)

WALLPAPER is an interactive and immersive piece of digital fiction that has been exhibited in the UK at Bank Street Arts Gallery in Sheffield as a largescale projection and as part of the Being Human Festival of the Humanities 2016 in Virtual Reality. Funded by Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it forms part of the Reading Digital Fiction research project led by Dr Alice Bell at Sheffield Hallam University. Reading Digital Fiction aims to raise public awareness of and engagement with digital fiction by analysing the way that readers respond, applying empirical methods and cognitive theory. Through its accessible storyline, strong visuals and immersive atmosphere, WALLPAPER has engaged non-academic audiences online, through live events and within gallery settings.

A work of short fiction, it follows the story of PJ Sanders, a USA-based computer engineer and innovator who returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda is to close the house down and sell it. First though, he wants to trial an experimental device he’s been working on to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood. WALLPAPER can be shown on a modern gaming PC, through large-scale digital projection and in Virtual Reality on the Oculus Rift.

To see a short film of its reception in the UK at the Being Human Festival of the Humanities, please visit http://wallpaper.dreaming-methods.com/being-human/ For more information about the work, the storyline, its development, screenshots, in-project footage and downloads, please visit: http://www.dreamingmethods.com/wallpaper http://wallpaper.dreamingmethods.com http://www.readingdigitalfiction.com

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)