In the
1990s, Loren and Rachel Carpenter experimented
with actual audience participation, using new techniques (as was customary at
the time) that they have been drawing on since 1991 with their company, Cinematrix. Based
on Pong they developed Dog and Cat, which premiered
at the Ars Electronica in Linz. The game was projected on a large screen in front
of about 5000 visitors. Each visitor received a small card with a red and
a green face. One half of the audience used this to control one of the
rackets, while the other half controlled the other racket. The
more red faces were held up, the further down the appropriate racket went down,
and with an increasing number of green faces, it moved in the opposite
direction. The colour patterns of the two parts of the audience
were monitored with cameras, and a computer calculated each racket's position
in real-time. The objective was not letting the dog, the
representation of the ball, reach the cats. The
audience's ability to control the rackets even at the ever increasing speed of
the dog, was astounding. Rapidly, there emerged analogies to the behaviour
of animal swarms which can hardly be explained as a conscious act.
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