With Peter van Haaften and Michael Montanaro
The audience speaks into the bells of two horns. Sound is inhaled into an alchemical apparatus. The collected voices become chaotically entangled within the tensile confines of an expanding latex balloon. Trapped inside the captured aether words collide, fragment, and recombine, modulating their contextual and phonetic arrangement. A soundscape of ricocheting voices is perceived, emerging from deep inside the balloon. Over time, the pressure becomes too great and like a sonic capacitor, sound is freed from its reservoir. The valves open. Airborne voices are forced through a series of reflective steel cornets towards an elastic membrane where mechanically induced friction compels the collected voices to incandesce. Behind the pulsating membrane, an iris opens, slowly releasing the luminous voice towards a series of glass lenses and mirrors. From here follows a five-part choral harmony of mirrors that builds into a final cacophonous performance of rhythm and light.
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This work probes the form-giving tendencies of nature by drawing kinetic chaos into conversation with sonic turbulence. The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically-prepared century-old pipe organ. In turn, Organism breaks down the long-domesticated and far-too-clean tone of the pipe organ in order to sound its turbulent materiality, liberating long-repressed timbres to be heard anew.
Located in front of Organism, Excitable Chaos produces ever-changing chaotic patterns by modulating the mass/orbital relations between its three interconnected arms. As a physical system with nonlinear behavior, it is animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy among its moving elements, highlighting how, in nature, even the smallest scales of magnitude are key contributors to emergent behaviours whose next states are unknown.
The generative movement of Excitable Chaos conducts Organism’s sonic behavior. The resulting compositions, as turbulent sonifications of chaotic patterning, are meditations on the sense of more-than-oneness that develops spontaneously in life and nature. Where our goal-oriented world is designed to produce predictably instrumental futures, this wild yet steerable principle of being more-than-one commits itself to perpetual uncertainty at the brink of unknowable futures.
In a small, quiet and acoustically reflective space, hangs a large Pendulum, swaying back and forth keeping regular time. At either end of a lateral beam at the bottom of the swinging pendulum are two downward facing mirrors mounted half an arm’s length apart. These mirrors are connected to the beam with servo-motors that automate movement of the mirrors with two degrees of freedom to form a pan/tilt mechanism. The mirrors are programmed to move so that they sweep and rotate, dancing a digital choreography that keeps them in dialectic opposition to one another. Sitting on the floor directly beneath the pendulum is a wooden box. Within this box is an array of piezo transducers producing sound that is projected as a beam straight up into the swaying pendulum.1 As the mirrors pass the sound beam, they reflect it around the space to create a perceptually-unfamiliar, three dimensional, moving reflection-space that extends and retreats from the physical piece while incorporating both the rhythm of the pendulum and the trajectories of the oppositional mirrors into its sonic form. The signal heard floating on this beam – the sonic content, imbued with eco/political meaning - is the sound of glacial ice melting in Greenland intermixed with narrated speeches drawn from materials published by both climate scientists and climate change deniers.
1 This utilizes open source ultrasonic heterodyning hardware produced by Richard Haberkern.