Realtime Support Staff
It took a number of people in real time to
run Placeholder as a performance - someone to play the
Voice of the Goddess
in the booth above the performance space,
and someone to sit by the
Goddess to relay messages via mike and headphones
to and from the rest of of the support staff
- which included a floor manager
and two assistants to help with participants
"suiting up", two of the four SGI
programmers taking turns in the windowless SGI room in the basement , and a programmer controlling
the sound processing computers in the audio
control room.
The support staff had a lot to do behind
the scenes - such creating new Voiceholders in the three worlds at the command of the
Goddess; much of the software was buggy, and had
to be rebooted on the fly - if the memory
leak on the SGI Reality Engine's texture
memory got beyond four megabyes the frame rate would suddenly drop below
tolerable limits and the whole system would
have to be rebooted. Additionally, between
runs we archived all of the audio recorded
by participants in the Voiceholders (all of which is
here on this archive).
The performances were exhausting, coming
on top of the grueling development and hacking...
during one evening performance,
John Harrison fell asleep below the table in the SGI room,
and
Rob Tow dozed off at the console, only to be awakened
by the Goddess' assistant yelling for "more Voiceholders!!!"
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