The Voice Mosaic is a web-art application that converges speech and image, building a visual mosaic on the web with the chosen colors and recorded voices of people who interact with it from any place in the globe. The voice interface, developed with open-standards in speech synthesis and voice recognition technologies, works through phone calls from any telephone – mobile or not (in English, in US: (800) 289.5570 or (407) 386-2174 / PIN number: 9991421055). The mosaic is seen/heard on the web (www.voicemosaic.com.br).

The application was developed in April/2004, in three languages – Portuguese, English and Spanish, both in the voice interface and the visual interface on the web. As the people who make phone calls to participate form the mosaic, and it happens spontaneously, the mosaic changes as time goes on. Also, as people can freely chose their color and record a free message to participate of the mosaic, its ongoing aesthetics and final result is unpredictable.

In this context, the Voice Mosaic causes time-space collapse, and maps in one screen participations that come from several different geographical places, in different languages, and different times. Furthermore, using the search field in the bottom of the screen, one can easily locate his participation by searching his own telephone number (which the phone call was made from). Besides locating himself, one can also locate all the tiles in the mosaic (participations) within the same telephone area, which means to map the geographical participations in the visual work.

The intention of this work is putting together in the same piece several dualities as, for example: speech/image-only, simple/complex, old/new, low-tech/high-tech, time/space, individual/community, passive/active, expected/uncertain, among others, in order to cause reflection and awareness about adding “voice” and “ears” to the internet and the media convergence and hybridization between the telephone and the web.

Adding to the visual map created by the mosaic, the recorded voices of people who participated through the phone calls are extensions of these people, since voice is one of the biometrical measures of the human being. In this sense, the voice mosaic is also a human body made of the voice several others.