John Klima's - Glasbead

John Klima's online art, Glasbead, is an interactive 3-D interface that allows 20 people to make music collaboratively. The interface is a 3-D translucent blue orb with stems that look like pistils of a flower radiating from the center of the orb. There are two types of stems, bells and hammers, which can be moved around the orb with the mouse. The bell stems are for participants to compose music and upload the file to the stem. By moving the purple rings around the bell stems, one can control the pitch and volume of the music. The music file saved on the bell stem plays when the hammer stem comes in contact with, "strikes", the bell stem. The idea behind the Glasbead came from a Nobel Prize winning novel by Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game. In the novel Hesse talks of a futuristic game where "cultural values are played like notes on an organ..." and requires input from people based on their background and knowledge. Klima created a spin off of this idea when making this piece creating a futuristic musical instrument requiring collaboration from different people.

This online art form is a very interactive piece which embraces the idea of New Media Art. By allowing people to simultaneously create music by themselves or with the help of others online, it brings people from different backgrounds together for a cause and to create art. While this interface allows people to create music/art, it also allows the other people on the system to analyze it and try to understand it. You don't have to be a composer to be creative on this system and have your "voice" heard by a lot of people. Klima is trying to bring people together to combine their ideas and provoke the creation of art that would otherwise not likely occur.

This interface is meant for bringing people together but it is art in itself. The orb and the stems are aesthetically pleasing and very cool to look at and interact with whether you are making music or just spinning the orb and moving the stems. I enjoyed this piece because I feel it encompasses all that New Media Art is. The piece is art in itself but it goes further than just that to being an interactive program for all people to enjoy!

I found this on the Mark Tribe website which can be found HERE.