Voicing with Code in Public

Voice Your Celebration was a public computing installation at Canada’s National Music Center, which offered a re-staging of computer code as a heterotopic form of participatory theatre. In the same way that the stage and the script can stand in between the audience on one hand, and actors and creators of a play on the other, in performances involving live digital art, pre-written code can also separate the coder and creators from the interacting audience. In this paper, we illustrate how Voice Your Celebration sought to address this divide by creating opportunities for the audience to become participants in the code itself by incorporating their voices and stories as integral parts of a widely used computational algorithm (Reynolds’s algorithm) for simulating flocking behaviour.