Helen Stuckey on ACMIpark / ruminations on Soundbyte

Very interesting piece on the ACMIpark installation / virtual environment by ACMI games curator Helen Stuckey.

In placing such corporate constraint on the design of acmipark, lost too was the opportunity to identify with a community. Due to ACMI’s stipulations it was closed to the electronic music, stencil art and open source communities to which its creators, selectparks, belonged. By requiring a high–end PC, broadband and technical sophistication to access, it was also beyond the reach of most causal visitors. Further complicating access was the fact that due to budget constraints it was not rigorously tested across a range of hardware or as user friendly as commercial game releases. In addition the work was understood and supported by ACMI in terms of more traditional non–networked installation artwork and an audience of online users was never specifically sought.

Pete and I should really go back and do a similar evaluation of Soundbyte (2001-2004). Soundbyte was a site where the music and video created in youth centres and in secondary schools could be hosted and shared. We had a great team working on its development in 2001/2. Kenny Sabir authored a new version of his online jamming tool DASE specifically for us, incorporating a whole host of new features at our request based on our experience with users at SoundHouse lab at the Powerhouse Museum. The site then pushed this tool for use within schools and ended up trialling it with Musica Viva. In the end we had created a much celebrated resource that never really reached its potential.

The main problem was that users had no real reason to return to the site. If they had produced music or video as part of a project at school a drop in centre, or at the Museum, then they would look at it once or twice, show their family and that was it. There was no incentive for them to browse other people’s works – as we had expected they might. I remember that MP3.com had a similar problem.

If we’d done the project a few years later we could have built it with a social networking engine under the hood which would have made it a lot more ‘sticky’ for users. Now, I’d add an auto podcast creator that would go through related productions and build a subscribable radio module, and a way of tagging uploaded content so users could browse ‘clouds’ of related uploads. Also, we would have insisted a little more insistently that DASE be developed as a open source project.

I did look at the ccMixter engine early last year, and there are plenty of other options these days. If we can organise some funding we’ll revive the ideas of Soundbyte project again.