TOWARDS Auslaender MICRO
concept, graphic, technical and sound design
andrew garton / john power / bruce morrison 

Auslaender Micro is a virtual opera. It has been designed as an interface through which each of its four acts can be explored. Various forms of navigation are provided where the user encounters numerous combinations of text, graphics and sound.

The opera follows the afterlife of an Eastern European refugee. A foreigner in every country, he passes away in a camp after countless years of restless travel and ruthless persecution, but in death freedom is as allusive as it was in life.

Auslaender Micro is derived from Auslaender und Staatenlose, an ambitious non-linear new media opera. Opera originated as a publicly accessible form of music theatre in the early 17th Century. It was defined as combining "the visual, aural and performing arts into one elaborate unity". Multidisciplinary production values are still inherent in today's opera. Auslaender und Staatenlose explores this same formula, but it does so within the context of new media, in particular the Web. Its "stage" is defined by way of a two-way interaction with its audience via the Web browser.

The development for the visual component of Auslaender Micro was influenced to the greatest extent by the collection of photographs and identification documents from war time Austria belonging to Andrew and his family, and by photos taken from Andrew's travels through Austria and the Czech Republic. Much of the imagery illuminates visual sequences in the narrative while attempting to navigate a space around the volumes carved out by the sonic presence of this screen entity we call a virtual opera.

Ghosts drift through deserted refugee camps, cross dreadful maps of human conflict, sink into the grainy wind of electronic media and communication, and dissipate in an ocean of swimming souls. We hoped to maintain the density of the photographic source material as well as projecting the figures into the ethereal cavern we imagine in the words "on line". This concern was addressed with the conventionally wide screen and the reduced, monochromatic palette.

There are 378 images, all images are 4 bit (have a possible maximum of 16 colours each) except some images used in the shadow effects and the splash screen. We used digital and scanned photos, documents, pencil and ink drawings. We recommend viewing the piece with your monitor set to at least 800 by 600 pixels, and colour depth higher than 8 bit (256 colours).

Early on in the project it was decided that Auslaender Micro would run on both major Web browsers, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Communicator. We were eager to take advantage of the relatively new Dynamic HTML (DHTML) technologies found in both these products. This posed many problems as the Document Object Model (DOM) employed by these products differ considerably.

Another decision was to produce Auslaender Micro as a truly HTML project. To do so, it was decided that the site should require no additional software (i.e. browser plugins and other browser add-ons) to function. This meant utilizing the primitive sound capabilities of both Explorer and Communicator, despite differences in their implementation of sound.

Frames, Cookies, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML were used to realise Auslaender Micro. The use of these features in combination was a journey in itself and has lead to a much greater appreciation of open standards and the work of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Auslaender Micro contains four looped, 11kHz 8 bit sound files. As each of the four acts is loaded a sound underscores it, maintaining audibility for the duration of the session.

The challenge was to create sounds that could be heard in repetition without irritating the users experience of the site. Each sound was also required to be indicative of the content of the act it was created for without distracting the user from the visual components of the overall site. Given that the final sound files had to be reasonably small in file size it was necessary to consider the quality after re-sampling from a high to a lower quality format.

The introductory sound, a somber drone, was required to introduce users to site as well as carry the theme of the 1st Act. It was created by recording at close range a Chinese bell as it was tapped with a mallet. This produced a variety of harmonics which became audible when digitally enhanced. Once the harmonics were isolated from other features of the recorded cymbal it was pitch-shifted down by a 5th, processed with slight reverb and resampled from 44Hz - 16bit to 11Hz - 8 bit. This ensured that we had a full, haunting sound at a reasonably acceptable file size.

A second somber, though more meditative drone was required for Act 2. The final sound is comprised of digeridoo, vocal chants and digitally manipulated traffic noise. Each sound was recorded separately, processed digitally, mixed together, cropped and re-sampled.

A harsh tangle of electronic sounds was sought to provide the underscore for Act 3. We opted for a synthesized sound that was created using freeware software on an MMX PC.

Loss and despair were the overriding themes required of the sound for the final Act. We used a recording Andrew had made of a Toucan in Brazil. Significantly pitch-shifted and treated with reverb the end result is more than haunting. It also seemed fitting to use the Toucan, a diminishing species, further echoing the grief encountered in Act 4.

Ausländer Micro was conceived and created by Andrew Garton, John Power, Bruce Morrison and Justina Curtis at Toy Satellite, Melbourne.

Auslaender Micro was produced by Toy Satellite in association with the Australian Film Commission and the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media (Department of Visual Communication, RMIT University). Auslaender und Staatenlose is a Project in Residence at the Ars Electronica Centre, Austria.

We would appreciate any feedback on the project. You can leave a comment in the Auslaender Forum or Guestbook or email Auslaender@toysatellite.