World Wide Ensemble

In World Wide Ensemble an endless landscape of frenetic audio and visual automatas, all entangled in one another, slowly scrolls before the eyes of the viewer, through a window cut in the wall. The trackball, situated on the side of the window, allows the visitor to change the direction of the movement, to explore other parts of this "planet seen from a satellite's window".

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World Wide Ensemble, by the French software artist Antoine Schmitt, is an abstract, programmed landscape of visual elements and sound. The visual elements, white, and gray on a black background) move quickly up and down or back and forth or make continual quarter turns against a black background. They are a kind of small automata, each with its own simple behavior. Sometimes they seem to join together to form a motor, an electrical diagram, or a rudimentary blueprint for a machine. They move past slowly as the viewer watches through a hole in the wall, as if looking out on the universe through the porthole of a spaceship. The only interaction between the viewer and the work takes place by means of a trackball he or she can use to navigate and investigate other parts of the landscape. Because the relationship between image and sound is not completely synchronous, and the consequences of the interaction are not processed immediately, a certain tension arises, allowing the user to form thoughts on the generative aspects of the work. We can read its elements as actors that make up a world and move together against their endless black background.

World Wide Ensemble by Antoine Schmitt (DEAF07) from V2_ on Vimeo.