"The fluttering of a butterfly in Hong Kong, can produce a storm in Los Angeles",

…just for us to remember that everything was always connected…

Butterflystorm is a telematic interactive installation inspired in the butterfly effect aphorism.

The installation consists in a bundle of applications that allow the communication and interaction between remote locations. Proposing by this way the creation of one common space where to experience and to consider about the communication technologies effects over our perception of space and time; and especially how they accelerate the processes of change and cultural transformation, creating communities that exceed the territorial frontiers and giving place by this way, to processes of remote interchange and interaction.

The installation's been presented simultaneously in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, on june 8 of 2002, inside the "III muestra de arte sonoro y visual", in the "Centro Cívico Convento de San Agusti" (Barcelona, Spain) and the "Expanda" event, in "El atajo" studio (Buenos Aires, Argentina).

The installation starts with a video based motion capture system that registers the movements of alive butterflys in a showcase and the public around them, this movements are transformed in control data across a pixel tracking application, and dispatched through the web to the other side of the world.

Once in the other side, the information extracted from the movement, which changes almost continuously, is analyzed and used to modulate parameters that define the process and the mix of skies and clouds images.

The production of sound begins from the filtering of white noise by sending the image histogram information to one multiband audio filter and mixing the outcome with thunder and rain sounds.

At the same time, a kind of chat which is part of the application, allows the public to send messages to the other side, this messages appear in the other side screens, mixed with the rest of the images and animated by the butterflys and the public movements from the other side of the world.

The product of the interaction can be seen in big screens at both installation's side.

In each side, a LAN was installed, composed by one Linux server and one Macintosh terminal.

For the realization we have developed various software modules for Mac OS and Linux platforms [jmage_1]. The applications were developed in Max/MSP and Nato.0+55 for Mac OS, and PD (Pure Data) for Linux.