Vespers
Vespers is a sound installation that composes a musical score in real-time, drawn from the online activity of the United Kingdom. Each day, the work begins afresh with a blank score, searching through the vast body of text and sound material posted online across the day, progressively composing a voice-led score that reflects and portrays our day-to-day concerns. Vespers is a secular evensong written for performance at dusk — a period of collective introspection on the day.
Throughout the day, a number of invisible software agents search the web for new material - fragments of conversations within online communities, comments from forums, audio uploads to social media sites - mapping the nation's thoughts, ideas and concerns.
Vespers references the ecclesiastical practice of evensong, a service of evening psalms that serves as a space for communal contemplation and reflection at dusk.
Exhibitions
- Southbank Centre, London (28 May — 14 September 2015). Commissioned by the Southbank Centre and World Wide Web Foundation.
Thanks to Diffbot for providing the web crawling and analysis technologies used in Vespers, and Damien Borowik for creating the drawing machine used within the work.