A different spin

Mashing audio and video, trio plans to remix tonight's presidential debate

From left: Eric Gunther, John Rothenberg, and Justin Manor make up Sosolimited. (Globe Photo/Josh Reynolds)

Tonight - if the plans stick - tens of millions of voters will be on their sofas staring at the television as Barack Obama and John McCain duke it out in the first debate of the presidential campaign. Here in Boston, several hundred will take in quite a different view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where the three-man audiovisual performance group Sosolimited will present what they're calling a "live remix" of the presidential debate.

Don't be misled by the remix tag. "ReConstitution 2008" isn't a dance-floor version of the McCain-Obama conversation, although John Rothenberg, Eric Gunther, and Justin Manor confess with horror that some folks assume they'll be spinning techno music during the point-counterpoint.

What this trio of MIT grads and design wunderkinds actually does is write sophisticated software that enables them to manipulate video, audio, and closed-captioned text in real time. Armed with tricked-out laptops and wearing anchorman suits and shades, Sosolimited will track speech patterns and eye blinks, analyze body language and word choices, and run reams of statistics as the event unfolds.

It's a little like watching a sporting event on ESPN.

"Information is gathered throughout the game to get people more into it," explains Manor, 30, who earned his master's at the MIT Media Lab. "Graphics are overlaid onto the screen to help you understand what the next play is about, and to give you a deeper appreciation of what's going on."

The goal is to entertain, but also to parse and analyze what the candidates are saying, using visuals to track the frequency of certain words and phrases. (Even if the debate doesn't happen, the remix will; the trio promises to work with footage from the Democratic and Republican conventions.)

At Sosolimited's headquarters - a.k.a. Small Design Firm, the Cambridge interactive design group where all three have day jobs - the group is practicing on clips from the 2004 debates between George W. Bush and John Kerry, which Sosolimited remixed at a Cambridge gallery.

On Gunther's monitor, fountains of text are flowing from the candidates' mouths. As words (literally) pile up and the transcript builds, keywords are collated in various ways: the number of times Bush uses a particular term, for example, and the relative proportion of "I," "we," and "us" references in Kerry's oratory.

In another segment from the 2004 face off, the trio built 3-D images based on word length. The candidates' speech was presented in concentric rings; as the debate went on you could see, at a glance, who was using bigger words.

Gunther turns a knob and voices are altered beyond recognition. Kerry suddenly sounds like a droid, but the guys are quick to point out that speech always remains audible and text legible during the live remix. (That said, there won't be an untreated feed to watch at the ICA, so if you want Obama-McCain straight up, you might do better watching elsewhere.)

"Our technology is about bringing out statistical and linguistic messages - the underlying content - to try to get beyond images and punditry," says Rothenberg, 28, who has several degrees in architecture and computation.

Yet removing information is as critical a part of the remix as adding it.

"When I don't see your face, I hear your words in a new way," says Gunther, a 30-year-old computer and electrical engineering expert. "When the tone of your voice is changed I understand you differently. We're creating these transformations and saying to people, 'Watch. Listen. How does this change the way you're processing these words?' "

That's a valuable shift in perception, according to Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

"When you're watching someone on television you can't help but be influenced by self-presentation," West says. "We often focus more on the delivery than the content. This strikes me as a fresh way to package the debates, and to engage people differently in the process."

Finding fresh forms of engagement is an ideal that feeds all of Sosolimited's projects, which range from irreverent residencies at nightclubs to large-scale public installations.

At the Middlesex Lounge, where the group used to perform monthly, their repertoire included esoteric remixes of infomercials and fishing videos, and farewell tributes to their heroes Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Pryor.

As part of the Small Design Firm team, Sosolimited's members have contributed to the creation of interactive installations at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, the human genome exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, the high-tech presentation of rare documents at the Museum of Sex in New York, and the cutting-edge video signage in the lobby of the ICA.

In 2006 Sosolimited christened the theater at the ICA's new waterfront location with "Read Before Opening," a multiscreen homage to instructional videos, and later that year entertained donors at the museum's fund-raising gala with a tribute to art forgery and theft made of spliced and reassembled scenes from the 1966 classic film "How to Steal a Million."

"I'm drawn to the way they're so technically savvy, media savvy, and tuned in to culture," says David Henry, program director at the ICA, "and how they bring it all together in such a very 21st century way."

The members of Sosolimited are committed Obama supporters but the show is nonpartisan and, Henry says, "people should feel welcome to be loud and boisterous."

To that end the evening will also feature DJs and dancing in the lobby, food and drinks, and - naturally - a voter registration table.

Sosolimited will stage live remixes of the second and third presidential debates, as well - Oct. 7 at the Art Directors Club in New York and Oct. 15 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Asked about the threat of copyright infringement, Manor bemoans the fact that CNN is releasing the broadcast under a Creative Commons license, which allows the footage to be modified or redistributed.

"We'd love a cease-and-desist letter," Manor says. "We'd love the free publicity."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.