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 a reasonably intelligent but still unpredictable way. Each iteration is different from the previous, but all have a beginning, middle, and end.

The Tech
A laptop running Apache with PHP chugs on an array containing data about all 565 MP3-encoded story segments from a total of eight storytellers. The logic and rule-driven functions therein create a unique XML doc (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. [I've thought about it, but the 40-45 minutes of story retelling definitely has more impact in a theatre / performance setting.]