Socially Interactive Feedback Loop

Socially Interactive Feedback Loop (SIFL) is a socially interactive installation based on the principle of feedback, which was developed and created by Dan Xu and Bram van Klink. SIFL is the result of a two-day workshop about the Speed of Sound, a work by Edwin van der Heide, hosted by Creative Coding Utrecht. For SIFL two pairs of microphones and speakers are interconnected to create a looped system. The audience is invited to excite the system and influence the feedback sound by moving the microphones closer or further away from the speakers. Together, the audience members can transform the feedback sounds: if one person covers one microphone, the loop is disrupted and the feedback process halts. SIFL plays with ‘feedback’ both in the sense of a closed audio system and a social interaction with each other, thereby exploring the emergent properties of sonic transformation and social behaviour.