Digital Oracles

Since ancient times oracles have been used by men to help choosing paths, and in the Digital Era we live in oracles are used more than ever. The continuous web growth and its consequent increasing complexity make it very difficult for humans to find information inside it. Therefore, in order to help men to find paths and get answers in the endless web routes came out the search engines -- the digital oracles -- such as Yahoo, Google, etc.

However, from the undeniable utility and importance of the digital oracles - without whom our web access and penetration would get very restricted - outcome their big power. Furthermore in the past people looked for ancient oracles consciously knowing their power and influence. Nowadays do people know what digital oracles really are? Do they realize the control those oracles exert over their choices and actions? Although search engines are digital entities, not spiritual or human ones, maybe their advices are as powerful as (or even more influential) than those from the ancient oracles.

Researches about search engines show among other things that 1) most of people choose among the options presented on the first results page; 2) search engines dont index the entire web, but a small part of it; 3) the website ranking in a search can be manipulated using SEO techniques; 4) search engines can filter and control results; 5) Google is today the predominant and most powerful engine; 6) people convey personal information while searching; 7) users declare they trust the results.

In this sense, this work intends to rise questionings related to digital oracles and their power over the digital and tangible life, such as mapping & control, determination of survival and existence, the Top 10 dictatorship, awareness about getting results in a search, privacy, etc.

Voice Mosaic

The Voice Mosaic is an interactive web-art that was born with the intention of allowing any person to participate using as interface the most pervasive and simplest communication device on Earth the telephone, through the media convergence and intertwinement (phone and web), blurring their edges in a hybridization phenomenon.

On the web, the work is presented as a multicolor interactive mosaic, in which each tile represents a person who got inserted in the work through a simple phone call, from anywhere, when he chose a color (for his tile) and recorded a free message (which will be listened every time someone clicks on his tile). The phone call to the work is possible via a voice interface developed with voice recognition and voice synthesis capabilities.

Through the individual visual signs (color tiles) and sonorous signs (recorded voice messages) that are formed via phone calls, the mosaic represents the whole community of people inserted in it. More than represent people, they mainly and intentionally form the Voice Mosaic, through the poetics spontaneously generated by the incrusted signs evolving in time and space.

The dualities individual/community, low-tech/high-tech, visual/sonorous, active/passive, human/computer, simple/complex, etc; are the paths where the Voice Mosaic intend to talk to its receptors/interactors, aiming reflections and attitudes relating the coexisting and symbiotic tensions, either in the work itself, as in our everyday lives.

To access the Voice Mosaic on the web, the URL is http://www.voicemosaic.com.br/. To be inserted in the work with a phone call, in US call (800) 289.5570 or (407)386.2174, and dial the following PIN number: 9991421055. In Brazil, call (11)3047.4790, and dial the following identification number: 1155723602. You can also interact with the Voice Mosaic using Voice Over IP (VoIP), and in this case, just call
** 869 1(999) 142-1055.

The mosaic presents interfaces in Portuguese and English, and soon it will be available in Spanish as well. The interface in several languages allows multinational participation, but the whole database is only one just one mosaic, just one community, assembling all differences and similarities, forming the diversity/conflict and the communion/coexistence in the whole.