Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez (br) with guest musician A Guy Called Gerald (uk)

Coded Narratives (CN) is a retro-futuristic, campfire type of experience for the audience as active participants, articulated by the proto-programming language of Morse Code, declared dead in 1999. CN is a story created intrinsically linked to its corresponding sound art, generated live via text input from the audience using an emerging technological object of digital media and communication—the tablet—as narrative tool and conduit of art. Other programming languages interact with Morse in the articulation of the tactile-audio-visual environment, resulting in a large chat-room, where the audience pours letters and meaning into the tablet as communal device and stirs the narrative in the cauldron of collective experience formed from individual input.

Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez is the artistic agent who formulates this socially interactive environment where the audience is invited as users of a system to generate the event that the audience/users experience and critique as it unfolds. The tablet is passed from person to person for the submission of text lines that are transcoded into Morse code binary tone immediately feeding into the sound apparatus of the musician, A Guy Called Gerald, who uses the tone as a layer of music composition.

For transmediale and  CTM the theme of Coded Narratives will be "Demotion" (being displaced) as standing for the process of degradation from a superior or relevant position to a diminished role like the Pluto, Morse Code or the disappearance of the single privileged source in the abundance of content and voices that is networked user culture. The audience is asked: "How did you feel? What did you do when you were demoted? What will you do if you are ever displaced?"

In collaboration with CTM Festival