Our performance occurred parallel to the Futurity Long Conversation at Transmediale 2010. This lecture / debate series lasted for nine hours and involved 21 artists, designers, and authors. There were two speakers on stage at a time, with a new speaker switched in every 20 minutes.

On a separate stage, Sosolimited performed a live remix of the conversation. Typists transcribed the words of the speakers. This text stream, along with video and audio, were fed into our analysis software. The visualizations were projected on a screen behind the typists.

The words of all the participants were matched to lexical databases, and sorted by topic, tense, and emotional coloring. We displayed real-time statistics of all the speakers and used a dozen or so different transformational modes throughout the night.

The participants were supposed to be talking about the future, so we felt it would be nice to track their verb tense usage and see if they did. Hardly anyone actually talked in the future tense, preferring the present tense by a wide margin.

We are currently developing a version of the performance for the the Longplayer San Francisco event. More information is at: longnow.org/longplayer/ and longplayer.org/what/whatelse/conversations.php