Automaton Circus. After a long, hard week, the Soft Architecture / Dedale Workshop culminated in a public opening (Friday, November 9) at the Hexagram Black Box (and a non-public dismantling). Overall, the workshop was a success, but it turned out quite different from what I imagined. Instead of spot lighting each monster, one at a time, they were strung about the room to form a pseudo- autopoietic system. The result was, then, an orgy of interaction. Media was driven by sound, video, and sensor data from the monsters. Using Arduino, Elliot Sinyor jacked sensor data from various monster-mounted sensors and routed them to Harry Smoak who controlled lighting, and to JS who created a beautiful Jitter projection. Tim, originally in charge of sound, passed his duties on to me after falling ill. I ended up ditching MAX/MSP (Tim’s granular patches), so for input I just used good old fashion analog sonic-sensors (a couple of contact microphones and a handful of wireless lavalieres) and for one monster, ‘sound’ from a guitar pickup. Everything was either processed with a touch reverb and chorus or used to modulate a Nord Modular G2 patch that I made (4 string-oscillators and 4 filters). In all, I had six channels shared between 8 speakers placed throughout the room (two on the ceiling, corners, closets).
Though it was a workshop, everything, the monsters and the media, came together at the last minute to form a spectacular installation. Harry’s dynamic lighting gave an unearthly feel to the whole thing, and, adding to the sense, everybody continued working, fine tuning, documenting throughout the ‘show’. I can imagine spectators felt slightly alienated; or perhaps just part of the process, the workshop aesthetic bleeding into the opening.
I’m ecstatic about how well my sound-design turned out. The string-oscillators delivered textures simultaneously organic, reflecting the analog, autopoietic nature of the event, and metallic, reflecting the substrate. Sounds were vaguely spatialized, so as you walked about the room, you’d come to notice after a few moments that what you were looking at was being aurally reprojected, distorted. The effect of the whole room was that of nervous activity; artificial, micro interactions manifested in erratic movements.
Overall, though it was a bit crude, I think everybody was pleased with the result. On the Tuesday after the workshop, I saw our lab director, Xin Wei, give a talk on Tracking vs. recognizing gesture in performative, realtime applications. At the end of the talk, somebody in the audience asked the inevitable question: “what are the real-world applications of this?” Xin Wei’s primary example was responsive architecture; architecture that conforms to humans, not vice versa. It was then that I saw what the workshop really was: a first foray (for TML) into the world of speculative experimental (soft) architecture (as well as a “phenomenological experiment”).
