Interactor

"In 1986 my soon-to-be mentor and Interactor collaborator Mort Subotnick had just come from a residency at MIT where he was using a program called Hookup created by a student there named David Levitt. Hookup was the first program I know of that used the "patch-cord" metaphor, i.e., modules that manipulate data are linked by virtual wires, the connection of which is determined by the user. For those in the world of early analog, patch-cord programmed synthesizers, this was a familiar interface.

Mort was using David's program to do tempo following of MIDI instruments — this allowed him to lock hardware MIDI sequences to the tempo of the live performers. I was a composition student at CalArts at the time, and word had gotten around that I was a good programmer. So Mort contacted me to see if I could hardcode some of the ideas he had implemented in Hookup on a Mac, so that he could use them in his next performance. That program (used in Mort's 1987 multimedia work "Hungers") would eventually become Interactor. Mort designed the functionality of the early versions, but I became more influential in the design as time went on. (...)

In 1996 Troika Ranch had a two-week residency at STEIM, where I first saw Tom Demeyer's real-time video processing program Image/ine. I first started using Image/ine in concert with Interactor, because Image/ine didn't allow the kind of complicated interactive decision making that I was used to having in Interactor. So, Interactor would process the MIDI data from my interactive sensors, and then tell Image/ine what to do. By 1998 I was using Image/ine in a major way in my performances with Troika Ranch."

Source:
Interview of Mark Coniglio by Scott deLahunta, 2002
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0301/msg00123.html
http://www.sdela.dds.nl/sfd/isadora.html

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