A/V DJs Remix Debate

No one wants to remember “Pop Up Video.” VH1 was young then and hadn’t yet solidified the type of obnoxiousness it would perfect with “Flavor of Love.” I’ll never watch the video to “Goody Two Shoes” again for fear of that incessant “Pop Up Video” ping.

I was afraid—viscerally afraid—that ReConstitution at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) was going to turn into Pop Up Debate and ruin the electoral process for me forever. The ICA billed the event as “a live remix of the first presidential debate, morphing words and images into a nonpartisan spectacle of light and sound,” which was not at all appealing to my scarred psyche.

Little did I know what I was in for. The evening was helmed by the Boston A/V DJ trio Sosolimited, whose original software transformed the debate into a spectacular of technical punditry. Using the audio, video, and, most importantly, closed captioning feeds provided by CNN, the three guys were able to track and count the candidates’ buzzwords, analyze their body language, and isolate their argumentative technique. The event was a nerd smorgasbord, as satisfying to the tech geeks as it was to the policy wonks.

I turned to Eric Gunther and Justin Manor of Sosolimited (the third member is John Rothenberg) for advice on how to describe what I had just witnessed. Their technique is not about distorting the debate, but rather about making it easier to understand.

“As much as we’re adding things, we’re also removing aspects of the broadcast so that you can concentrate on other things,” Gunther said. “If you blur their faces, you hear their words in a different way. It’s a fundamental perceptual shift, when you don’t have the things you take for granted.”

It’s true: talking about the debate with friends over the next couple of days, there were points where my responses differed widely from theirs. One of Sosolimited’s tricks, for instance, was to stack the candidates’ answers on top of each other, lining up their most frequently used words so you could see their context. John McCain may seem to have a smoother delivery style, but it turns out that his is less fluent than Barack Obama’s. McCain would often stop in the middle of a sentence or leave out a verb, while Obama’s more frequent pauses were always followed up by a completely formed idea.

The software program takes care of most of the analysis, but it’s up to the guys to pick out the trends that the computer identifies and to change from one program to another. All of this has enormous manipulative potential, highlighting one candidate’s screw-ups and the other’s shining moments. But the whole thing takes so much attention to run that they don’t have time for partisan trickery.

“We’re pilots,” Manor said. “There’s basically this enormous leviathan of controls, and we’re paying no attention to the passengers. We’re just trying to bring the plane in for a safe landing.”

Their technique was flawless. On top of the sentence-layering program, called “Remember When I Said,” there was “Just Face It,” which zoomed in tight on each candidate and repeated the image in little dots across the screen, occasionally freezing a screen shot that would stay as the debate continued. There was also “Me, You, and the Other Guy,” which charted when the candidates referred to themselves, to their opponent directly, and when they referred to him in the third person. “Witness Protection” blurred their faces and altered their voices, and “Conspiracy Theory” negated certain words to make you reconsider their arguments.

The crowd ate it up. The whole night was sponsored by Dewar’s White Label Whiskey, and the bar downstairs probably contributed to the amount of cheering and booing that occurred during the broadcast. Sosolimited looked a little tense before things got started, but as soon as the debate was over they pulled out a bottle of the sponsor’s specialty and toasted a job well done.

The trio, which formed in 2003 while its members were doing graduate work at MIT by day and clubbing by night, wanted to send a political and cultural message, but more than that, they just wanted to nerd out together.

According to Gunther, “We realized that if we put our heads together, we could really do some damage.”

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.