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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathMusic as a model
 
Oval Process Public Beta (Popp, Markus), 2000
 
 
 

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One has to carefully consider accesses, in order to transfer statements on the levels of the user’s guide, work ergonomics, usability, software functionality, and interface design.

What I make available with «Oval Process» is an exemplary, temporary work environment. I leave this open to criticism and invite evaluations of what one sees. My goal is to create a communicative situation between the public and those interested, and facilitate an access that demands involving oneself with «Oval Process». In doing so, a certain competence should be transferred to another level. Nowadays the users bring to situations their own corresponding background, which, technically or music-historically speaking, need not be established in advance, but rather appear while working with software on a daily basis. «Oval Process» should serve to develop a few criteria and link them to the music, as opposed to seeing only the musical result. Correspondingly, «Oval Process» is not first and foremost a statement that sees itself in connection with art or installation, but more so a document that expands on my own work in the areas of interaction and usability. The starting

 

point is, of course, my status as a recording artist who also makes «audio only» CDs. My preliminary considerations for «Oval Process» as a document for linking an interactive software environment and sound installation in a public space were as follows: To begin with, I didn’t assume the role of a creative Self. Instead, I wanted only to suggest the generative processes. This meant generating several standards and interfaces and making them available. Apart from that, I wanted the work on the interface developed thematically: not to play out the tricks, but to name the conditions of the tricks. And most important, if also trivial, I didn’t plan to have consumers at the receiving end, but rather an active user – which wasn’t trivial at all, as working on software fundamentally differs from producing audio CDs. In conclusion: as opposed to a product-oriented definition of my own work, I pursued a process-oriented one. I wasn’t interested in keeping everything sellable in some form. «Oval Process» is, therefore, a sketch for an interactive authors’ environment. This means that one has a manipulative, iconic, and easily accessible user’s surface. The accompanying idea is to suggest the tools

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