Talkaoke - Centraleuropean Tour

Saul Albert and Michael Weinkove, London
Summary: 

Talkaoke is a mobile, battery-operated chat-show. The host sits in the middle of the doughnut-shaped table, guests sit around the edges, the conversation begins and the UFO of chat is launched! Absolutely anything can happen, apart from two things: no singing, and no punch-ups. The conversation is streamed live to the internet, where online talkaokeists can participate in the conversation by email or IRC. Talakoke team are Saul Albert and Michael Weinkove from London. Talkaoke is part of "The People Speak!", EU enlargement tour 2004.

What?
The People Speak is a set of ideas and strategies for stimulating debate, conversation, and self-expression.

Why?
"Democratized media" is a very popular buzzword in broadcasting and publishing at the moment. Hybrid forms of electronic communication and publishing that have developed over the last decade such as mailing lists, webcasts, and blogs have been taken up by the large broadcast/publication interests that initially saw them as a threat to their market share. While these communications systems do offer a wider participation in the creation of "content", they often use that apparent "openness" to hide the social, political and technical structures they're based on.

Theps.net projects are experimental communication forms that try to take "Democratized media" in a more interesting direction. They're as obvious as possible: a chat show (talkaoke), a radio interview (traffic'island disks), a word (the dicshunary), the power structures are clear, and no instruction manual is required. The people speak!

http://theps.net/enlarge