In 1995 the America Online chat room was beginning the redefinition of social space. When first shown, "Chat Rooms" consisted of five soundtracks, each soundtrack playing through a pair of speakers, in its own plexiglass box mounted on a pedestal. The work was designed primarily as short (5-10 minute) radio broadcasts, in the tradition of the radio play.
The audio for each of these “plays” began as scrolling dialogue in chat rooms of AOL. Individuals occupying the same "room" were communicating via modem from locations all over the US. Joe Santarromana (user name: Joe S18790) and I (user name: Twin A9508) entered rooms simultaneously, but from their own homes, to "speak" with each other, and experiment with premeditated manipulations of the environment. The recorded dialogue you hear is an edited transcript of our sojourns in these internet spaces. The "characters" you hear were voiced by actors we hired. Each utterance was recorded directly and separately into the computer as digital data files. Two voices were never in front of the microphone at once, or recorded sequentially; the sequenced dialogue was produced by the pasting of one small file of sound information next to another, (much as these utterances appear in a seemingly endless scroll on screen, on line).
