Squidback: A Decentralized Generative Experience, based on Audio Feedback from a Web Application distributed to the Audience

Squidback is a participatory and contemplative experience, a collective generative soundscape without a central preferred point of view, whose sound sources are the audience’s smartphones or computers working as audio feedback generators. The work aims at creating a ritual space to explore fields of play between being performer and audience, situating control, affect and listening in between human/machine and machine/environment ecosystemic interactions.
Squidback is implemented as a browser-based app, hosted on the Internet as a perennial web installation [1]. The code is open-source and available online [2]. Evaluation has been done by examining activities in which the system has been used, and comments from artists who included it in their works.