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tion by using audience polling to target market histories of the world which are
not actually intended or desired.
A democratic, recombinant history
Utilizing indirect questionnaires as a user interface, the system essentially target
markets each audience with an appropriate history. Rather than asking audi-
ences what type of history they would like, or how they would like to navigate
through history, they are asked questions about their own demographics and
psychographics: their work status, what cultural trends they find most disturb-
ing, how well they get along with others, etc. The resulting history holds a fun-
house mirror to the audience, reflecting an exaggerated and distorted view of
the audience's biases. A sample question follows.
What is the most pressing issue facing the world today?
A.
Men are becoming too feminine and women too masculine.
B.
People are forgetting their ethnic heritage.
C.
Machines are becoming smarter than people.
D.
Its getting harder to earn a living and support a family.
E.
People are turning away from God.
The most unfamiliar and perhaps unsettling feature of the interaction is that
audiences must publicly applaud for their given answers, changing a simple
response into a public display. The applause meter was chosen as the input
device for two reasons: ease of setup in different venues and the audience dy-
namic created by public applause. The applause meter requires no special setup
in a theater. All that is required is a good quality directional microphone and a
small mixing board. Alternative input devices, such as buttons or knobs placed
at every seat, would be difficult to install. Such devices would effectively pre-
vent
Te rmi na l Time
from traveling to many venues. More importantly, applause
metering enables interesting and entertaining audience dynamics. These inter-
action dynamics was originally explored in
The Consensual Fantasy Engine
,an
interactive cinema piece by Paul Vanouse and Peter Weyhrauch (Vanouse and
Weyhrauch 1995).
The applause interaction creates a collaborative, yet competitive relation-
ship with other audience members. The interaction is collaborative in the sense
that the phenomena is totally collective, yet competitive because the winning
responses will inevitably change the ensuing representation of world history,
the very basis from which ethnic, religious and ideological self-awareness has
stemmed. With applause, the audience members can gauge how the audience
