KURATOR  curating + research

Knowbotic Research, exhibited as part of Silicon Dreams

Date:

2009

In this installation, balloons, filled with helium, hover freely in space, suspended in a state of limbo, kept in subtle motion by an intermittent breeze of air generated by a circle of rotating fans. The audience is free to play with these balloons and the system emits standing waves and tracks the sonic feedback in order to monitor the changing configurations of the balloons. The system calculates and modifies its sound frequencies according to the locations of the balloons, thus creating ambiance in the space. This self-calibrating audio system also plays the sounds of a pre-recorded voice which proclaims lines about black cat. At first glance, the balloons seem to be black cats with which we are invited to play. The space appears to be a recreational environment in which everybody can “be creative”, be rebellious, play with the cats and have fun. The movement of the balloons is similar to the sounds defining the physical experience of space in a “negative interaction”: when the visitors touch, hit or move the balloons around, the delicate sonic and spatial balance is interrupted, causing disturbances in the soundsphere and making the voices disappear. If we want to find out more about this we must remain passive and ignore the playful spectacle of the hovering balloons.

In the My Black Cat installation, visitors engage and intervene in the resonance and self-oscillation potential of the aural architecture. We developed an explorative setting to deal with its resonance and oscillation conditions; it consists of a sound frequencies recording and processing software, a pressure zone microphone, four loudspeakers and a dynamic balloon space that, together with the enveloping walls, serves as a resonant body. The software records the aural conditions and feeds them back into the space. In this feedback loop we use two nonlinear functions to control both volume and pitch. The challenge is to push this cybernetic feedback system towards states of temporary auditory equilibrium, where it can detect and monitor minimal physical changes among the visitors in space. Thus, we receive an aural architecture in a state of exception. It enables us to materialise, in its resonance and oscillation fields, the image of the Black Cat evoked by a pre-recorded female voice heard in the space “My Black Cat is black”. The aural architecture serves as an immersive soundscape which incorporates and calculates the moving bodies of the visitors and the objects in the space using both auditory and time-coded logics. Paradoxically, this aural architecture considers the visitors part of its space as long as they don’t move, but it excludes them as soon they grasp the playful logic of the balloon space: the voice describing the Black Cat disappears as soon as visitors try to move in the space or attempt to hit the balloons. Even in this mode of negative interaction, which entails a radical standstill, the observer can only listen to the oscillating hiding place of the Black Cat but will never be able to reach her.