Work in progress by Dee Mee Tree.
Various technologies that allow online collaboration are getting more and more popular, especially with the rise of Web 2.0 services, such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
The content is created collectively, the skills and knowledge are exchanged across the borders, the new narratives are created and re-created each time the information is transmitted.
In Macro-Phone this phenomenon is explored through sound. The audience (present both physically and virtually) is invited to use their mobile phones as microphones and contribute their own material real time by dialing a special number.
At the same time, the receiving device becomes a sort of "macro-phone", receiving and playing out live all the material transmitted through the cellular waves, a sort of one big ear, which is also opened to cracks and impurities, such as feedback, low quality telephone sound, and transmission delays.
Similar to the way information is treated on the world wide web, the sound will be appropriated by the collectively created structure, played live, get looped, sampled, distorted, or simply deleted. What will become of the sound? How will the "actual" live voices interact with the "virtual" sampled ones? What is the role of "conductor" / "editor"? Will the seemingly open structure start replicating itself and close itself down to all external input? What should happen for it to open up again?