Michaela Davies

Advertising prides itself on disruption. But what if you could disrupt advertising?

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This Christmas, Holler advertising agency allowed the public to do just that. Members of the agency were connected to Electric Muscle Stimulation (EMS) devices and the Internet via IP cameras. The public could watch Holler employees at work, and disrupt them at will with the click of a mouse. The user simply needed go online, choose a stream, click the 'Disrupt' button, and watch as the electricity zapped the volunteers, momentarily interrupting their ability to continue the task at hand.

The ‘disruption’ web interface was built with Backbone.js for view rendering and UI interactions and switching video streams. It connected to the server via Socket.io to listen to broadcast events (zap), and to trigger a zap. Disrupt used a Single node.js server hosted on Heroku to manage queues and handle Socket.io connections. This server would receive and validate a ‘zap’ from a user, and then trigger a broadcast event which all users/clients were subscribed to. Once a message was received, the socket server converted it to OSC format in order to communicate with MAX/MSP, and transmit that message over UDP protocol to MAX, subsequently triggering the EMS device to deliver the shock to the desired user. This happened all within milliseconds.

For each disruption Holler donated a $1 to The Factory, a local community centre with a long history of engaging artists in community development projects.

The interactive webcast lasted for over 4 hours, raising a grand total of over $5500. The agency achieved precious little work.

EMS hardware & MaxMSP interface consultation and implementation: Michaela Davies

Max patch design: Alex Davies

OSC/MAX interface: Can Ertel

Streaming: BlueCentral

Sys Support: IPMG

Disrupt was created by Holler Sydney in collaboration with Michaela Davies.

Documentation by Holler Sydney (2014)