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The Aphasia Machine

When I was at the University of Alabama, I would often go home to see my grandmother, Opal Vickers, in Mississippi.

The drive was about two hours, and I had plenty of time for daydreaming. It was on one of those drives that I first thought of using something like a radar screen as a triggering device. I only thought of sounds at first, but in a conversation with Michael Keller, we hit upon the idea of using the same trigger for pictures... or other smaller movies, anything really.

I have lots of big dreams for the Aphasia Machine, but I need to learn more about Flash. The stuttering sound, while interesting, is unintentional. A happy accident of sorts.

Due to the way Flash handles collisions between objects, as long as the line is touching the object, the object will be triggered. Or retriggered if it's already sounded. Thus the 'echo' of the words, sounds, or images.

But I would like to have a screen with several sounding boards, and with a wider variety of objects to place on the triggering screen.

Ideally, the viewer would be able to add her own objects or sounds, and I would love a way to save the position of the objects so that the 'compositions' could be shared.

Below, I'm including some of the sketches I did as I worked out the idea on paper first.
I'm also including two links, one to the artist statement I wrote for Dr. Frankel, which relates this machine to Blake's Songs of Innocence and also a link to the .fla file that you can open in Flash. Note that without the sounds or the font I used in the Flash movie, you won't be able to exactly reproduce my movie, but if you know something of Flash, you might find it interesting. The only thing I ask is that if you make something you like, please forward it to me, or send me a link where I can see it.

The Aphasia Machine Artist Statement (Microsoft Word .doc)

The Aphasia Machine Source File (Adobe Flash .fla)