Yesterday evening, I went to the SimpleTEXT audio/visual performance by Family Filter. I was looking forward to it, but was a bit bitter as someone had just stolen my beloved mobile phone, so I coulnd’t really participate.

Only two of the Family Filter members, Tim Redfern and Duncan Murphy were there. Jonah Brucker-Cohen couldn’t come.

People in the audience are invited to submit messages to control the audiovisual output of the installation (guiding how the music is created, and rhythmically driving a speech synthesizer) and the images that appear on the screens. Tim and Duncan had warned that the sms or e-mail had to be short as the images came from a search on Google.

I found it really good. Unfortunately, the performance was a bit spoilt by the fact that many people found it more amusing to send each other long messages such as “Hi Jos�, I’m here, were are you?” which of course triggered only a “No image found” result with the text of the message underneath.