Stories are recollections. Subversations collects these stories, mashes them up, and retells a super-story using controlled, randomized computational models.

The Premise
Record a bunch of stories, chop them up, write a program to reassemble the pieces in intelligent but unexpected ways. Each time you hit Play is different from the previous, but very iteration has a beginning, middle, and end. It's really uncanny.

The Tech
In public performance, a laptop running PHP chugs on an array containing data about several hundred (version 1.0: 565) MP3-encoded story segments from several (version 1.0: eight) storytellers. The "intelligent" program uses logic- and rule-driven functions create a unique XML document (actually, it's XSPF) containing the sequence of tracks. A Flash-based XSPF player (musicplayer.sourceforge.net) then plays the MP3s in real time with no gaps between (because it's all running locally from the laptop), thus creating an experience that would be difficult to obtain if Web-deployed. The longish (version 1.0: 40-45 minutes) retelling definitely has more impact in a theatrical setting, but is almost possible to authentically experience online.