In December 1999, the magazine Panoplie.org online asked Incident.net to create short interactive experimentations on the theme of silence.

Two people, let's name them A and Z, speak to one another, yet they are spatially distant.

Because of this spatial distance, each of the sounds they make travels from one to the other so that they can each listen to what the other says. The time of the conversation is said to be "real": the destinateur and the recipient have the feeling that their understanding of what is being said and the act of speech itself are simultaneous. They can exchange subjects and their role.

Nevertheless, all exchange is punctuated by silence, a silence that no one can hear and that exists in the distance of the conversation. The sound will take one second to arrive to an interlocutor who is 340 meters away. This humanly imperceptible silent second makes speech and the monitoring of speech possible. A silence that browses the sound.

The Speed of the Silence questions the difference between language and the interactive device. The distance of bodies and the speed of the sound imply an anachrony that places the effect of parity of the dialogue out of his hinges. The exchange of roles (the one that speaks and the one that hears, the one of which one speaks, but also the one that interact) is not function of a transparent communication but of a gap within voices.
What it is when I speak to you, when I address you on the network or out of him? Here the speed of the sound, there the speed of light. Here the sound, there pixels and packets of elated information of the server to the user. in any case a differed time.

" Passibility: the opposite of " impassiveness "? is not something destined you, of what there is not to feel. You are touched, you will only know then it. (And while believing the knowledge, you will be mistaken on this " key ".)

Jean-Fran