Orai/Kalos presents images and audio in an interactive computer-driven installation that continually varies its content and composition. Orai/Kalos is an intermedia work, where sound and image events are controlled by the same underlying parameters, and an interactive work, where each visitor generates new configurations. Visual and audio events consist of kaleidoscopic samples of natural and manmade patterns, plus underlying media-derived imagery. Orai/Kalos examines how communications technologies seduce us visually while they mix geographical locations and persons together into new constellations.

Orai/Kalos was first presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art, October 2002, in Nagoya, Japan. The Center for Art and Technology at Northwestern University provided material support for the project; BOXMedia provided some useful audio. A revised version (using magnetic sensors) was presented at SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles, USA, with some valuable assistance from Apple Computer. In 2005, a further revision was presented at the International Computer Music Conference in Barcelona, Spain, where the artist also spoke on a panel on table interfaces. A useful online resource on tangible interfaces grew out of that panel. In August 2006, documentation on Orai/Kalos was presented in the New York Digital Salon, as part of an ongoing video series on Abstract Visual Music. Two of the curators, Jack Ox and Cindy Keefer, kindly mention my work and ideas in their essay On Curating Recent Digital Abstract Visual Music.

Paul Hertz, Artist Other online materials: