Tower

Simon Biggs with Mark Shovman developed a virtual interactive artwork in response to a commission of the Poetry Beyond Text project. Tower is inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel. Inter-subjective relations are central to this work, which evokes the idea of first-, second- and third-person perspectives. Tower is an interactive work which creates an immersive 3D textual environment combining visualisation, physical interaction, speech recognition and predictive text algorithms. Viewers (or inter-actors) occupy one of three roles: as central inter-actor, wearing a VR head-display, as one of several inter-actors, wearing 3D spectacles, or as spectator, standing outside the interactive zone. The central inter-actor is located at the vertiginous pinnacle of a virtual spiral word structure. When the inter-actor speaks their spoken words appear to float from their mouth and join the spiralling history of previously spoken words. As the uttered word emerges other words, predicted on the basis of statistical frequency within a textual corpus, spring from the spoken word. The second-person inter-actors see words appearing from the first-person inter-actor's mouth and the spiral gradually growing, with the first-person inter-actor at its pinnacle, while the third-person observers stand outside the interactive zone, observing the tableau. As it grows the spiral comes to resemble a Tower of Babel composed of words, spoken and potential. (Source: Poetry Beyond Text)