My patcher is now nearly completed. It is looking pretty complicated (click the thumbnail for a closer look!). Having now played with it quite a bit it works really well, achieving most of the aims i set out to explore. It allows any user to have a conversation with users in the past. The samples selected at random create a disjointed and abstract conversation which provokes the user into many different responses. The strength of the experience is really based on the content that gets recorded. To help stimulate more interesting responses i have included some questions which get asked once the user has typed in a phone number. On that note i forgot to mention i have added two new functions, essential to the process of television conversation.
The first is a ringing function. If the phone is left idle for a while, it starts to ring, prompting users to pick it up. As described in ‘Telephone Conversation’ by Robert Hopper:
‘The telephone’s atonal summons typifies our awkward age. When the telephone rings we stop whatever we were doing and scramble toward the promise of conversation.’
The other is a usb keypad which allows users to pick up the receiver and dial in a phone number. The numbers input by the user influence what question they are asked first. Basically there are 10 questions, numbered 0-9, and one of the numbers enetered by the user (also 0-9) is selected to choose a question to initiate conversation. After that the selection is random from the saved sound clips generated by other users.