C.R.E.D.O. – Cosmic Radio Engine for Delusional Observations

A radio telescope scans the skys in search of signs of extraterrestrial life.

The received raw signals serve as input data for a neural network, which was trained on human theories and ideas of aliens. Now it tries desperately to apply this knowledge and to discover possible messages of other civilizations in the noise of the universe. Mysterious noises resound as the artificial intelligence penetrates deeper and deeper into the alien data, where it finally finds the ultimate proof.

The sound installation revolves around one of the oldest questions of mankind – one that can never be disproved: Are we alone in the universe? This question will remain unanswered until at some point a positive proof is provided. After all, the absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. Until then it was and is a question of faith, of convictions and assumptions, on the borderline between reality and fiction, where scientific knowledge and wildest speculations merge.

Prior the exhibition opening, a cyber shamanistic initiation ritual for delusional cosmic radio engines has been celebrated, serving as an initialisation process for this type of earth-heaven-interfaces by using VR glasses and a human priestess.

Special thanks to Marco Pasini.

Pareidolia is a research-based exhibition that critically engages with the legacy of renaissance proportions in architecture.

A corpus of architectural drawings featured in Giacomo Antonelli’s volume Vie, piazze e monumenti di Roma (1835), recently digitized from the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s holdings, is turned into a dataset for a “self-learning” neural network. After a training process, the software generates drawings translated from algorithmically derived cityscapes. Besides transposing the nineteenth-century visual input into a computational output, the network iteratively produces new rules for its progressive calculations. It thereby accentuates and re-invents, in dream-like visualizations, canonical design elements, relationships and proportions. Machinic pareidolia—the flickering projection of learned patterns—is here employed to test out the potential for variance contained in the scripts of a long influential architectural style, as they undergo contingent, individual interpretation.

Showcased at the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Sala degli specchi are the rare books on architecture that the software was trained on, as well as visualizations that span across different media and formats. These visualizations provide insights into the algorithmic processuality itself—generally opaque to nonspecialist observers—and into its outcomes. With this constellation of exhibits, Pareidolia seeks to draw attention, more broadly, to the potentials and limitations of the use of artificial intelligence in artistic and architectural practice. What type of expertise does the inventive potency of algorithmic writing presume, and how do its pragmatics and aesthetics generate new knowledge in turn? What meaningful ways of engagement with the past can a combined human and machinic authorship perform, as it re-activates archival materials without losing sight of ever-recurring historical, social, and technical biases?

Created in collaboration with Villa Massimo and Bibliotheca Hertziana.

Audiovisual performance for objects burning in earth’s atmosphere, artificial intelligence and human musicians

With the help of an antenna facing south-west, the artists receive the signal from a French military radar system called GRAVES. This transmits radio waves from the ground to space; high atmospheric layers reflect them back to earth. This reflection registers each object as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

Two musicians perform these data in real time. The noise of the sky is translated to the range of the respective instrument. Atonal soft noises sound unanimously as long as no meteor, satellite particles, unknown flying object or other artifacts disturb the silence of an unharmed atmosphere. However, the impacts of the incandescent objects in the Earth’s atmosphere are set to music by both performers together. While one instrument receives the raw signals as notation, the notes of the second instrument are algorithmically alienated: an artificial intelligence searches the raw data for the tiniest possibilities of music, taking these unknown, non-worldly sounds as an occasion to dream of familiar melodies.

In a kind of musical relay, the piece is ideally performed over several hours, taking into account the timeless character of the meteorites, the universe and its potential inhabitants.

Special thanks to Ensemble Resonanz.
All pictures and video from performance at Radialsystem Berlin.

Created as part of the fellowship program #bebeethoven, a project by PODIUM Esslingen on the occasion of the Beethoven Anniversary 2020, funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

The project arises out of the fascination about Giovanni Battista Piranesis books of the roman antique architectures Antichità Romane. In this body of work his drawings collected and maintained the identity and spatial imprint of the rich roman heritage. Contemporaneously he secretly fantasized about miraculous Capriccios – artistic speculations and manipulations that were based on his architectural observations and design principles. He deciphered the language and codes of the roman antique architecture and transformed them into spatial outlines of an imagined city ”that might have been”.

Aided by the archaic medium of hand drawings and the virtually unlimited processing power of cloud based computer technology, we attempt to explore these underlying aesthetics in form of an artistic experiment. Customized algorithms autonomously learn over time how to read and build relations out of the roman architecture language, by revealing an aesthetically common ground that establishes a bridge between artificial intelligence and artistic intelligence. The first version of Roma Eterna artificially reimagines facades based on hand drawn residential homes and palazzos, digitized from the 19th century french compendium Edifices de Rome Moderne by Paul Marie Letarouilly. During a process of abstraction, elements of the facades get categorized by their architectural function and genre. These classification masks are fed into a neuronal network that learns over several days how to identify characteristic elements out of the facade drawings and, in a next step, how to draw hallucinated versions of them autonomously. Each iteration brings up a new vivid memory of the past.

The first promising results lead us to the underlying question: What are beautiful proportions and where can we find and comprehend those design principles in our renaissance drawings? A series of investigations in the fields of mathematics, design and architecture allowed us to extract a fundamental system of compositorial rules into a generative algorithm. Like a playful duet the design engine autonomously proposes new facade layouts based on common cultural aesthetics that will be seen, interpreted and answered by the artificial intelligence.

Fantasie#1 is an audiovisual performance for radio telescope, artificial intelligence and self-playing organ.

Located outside of the venue, the radio telescope listens to the vastness of space. The received electromagnetic waves are transferred to the audible frequency range. Electronic noises, hums and beeps fill the air. An algorithm transcribes the noise of the universe into midi tones, which are reproduced by the organ with the help of an electronic apparatus. During the play various selection and filtering processes (e.g. specific artificial intelligences) are applied in a determined order, serving as a kind of score and dividing the piece into three main chapters. The artists on stage have a set of parameters available to respond live to the incoming signals, using both the radio telescope and the AI as musical instruments. On the floating canvas above the stage, the sounds turn into abstract images, into a visual representation of what is heard.

Little by little, neural networks take control over the organ and seek in the non-worldly noises for known harmonies, for the smallest traces of human music. In the last chapter, ideas of melodies evolve as the artificial intelligence begins to fantasize about familiar tunes in these archaic sounds from outer space.

Thanks to Sebastian Müllauer for the telescope and Klaus Holzapfel for his Orgamat.

Abdruck is the title of an ephemeral installation at the Tempio di Minerva and also stands for how research and method during the work process were approached. The german expression describes the operation of a negative form resulting from a positive and vice versa. The idea roughly finds its equivalent in the english “sonic imprint” and italian “Impressione sonica”. A first fascination with the Tempio di Minerva derives equally from its history and recurring presence in art/architectural history. It has been documented and used by Piranesi, Palladio and many others. A projection ground and instrument for the assertions, fantasies and interpretations of differtent minds and epochs.

Tempio di Mnerva’s history is full of mysteries and even in current research its actual purpose or original use has never been clearly determined. Moreover, the life of the temple is full of transformations and structural changes. Built as a prototypical structure and ideal form, it got ruined in decay over time but also remodeled and transformed from a temple surrounded by landscape to a monument inside the city. As a preliminary exercise, we couldn`t resist actually producing a set of drawings ourselves. These drawings show the tempio in three epochs, and by this, in its threemain life stages: 400 A.D. as an operating temple; 1600 A.D. as a ruin outside of the city, surrounded by fields; and 2017 A.D. as a monument overgrown by the city of Rome.

This sets the background of our projects by asking questions after combining the research of all collected documents - a span from ancient times to the fast-paced, loud and busy elements that surround the Tempio di Minerva today. How can the Tempio become more than just a fraction of memory - but again a lively part of the city? How could, in musical ways, a geometry be read as a partitur (score) with an installation that makes the temple an instrument – a “body of sound”?

The project develops from these initial points: recording the noises of the surrounding city and live-transfering them into a musical sound installation. Making the Tempio an oasis within the city allowing to experience an altered version of the actual tonal impacts. The interior of the Tempio acts like a vase. The sound waves emitted from the city are giving the Tempio its form, and vise versa. Like a bat in a cave experiencing the space through the pattern of soundwaves being reflected by it. By transforming sound and space, the project will transform and renegotiate the Tempio’s relation within the city of Rome as well as its role within the context of time.

Produced for MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo and 서울도시건축비엔날레 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017 in cooperation with Future Architecture.

Lumière is an audiovisual composition for lasers and sound. The building blocks of the piece are a new type of events, a compound of visual shapes and a sonic counterparts. The work is based on hundreds of these audiovisual 'notes', to create a previously unseen and highly synchronized immersive experience. The lasers project on a large screen, partially obscured by a wall of fog, which also makes the intensive beams of light visible in the air, connecting the lasers in the back of the room with the front, forming fragile temporary objects above the audience. The special quality of the laser light allows to combine complete darkness with moments of extreme brightness, pure white with intense saturated colors and precise movements with complex organic shapes.

© Studio Robert Henke

Zollverein's "Mischanlage" (mixing facility) is an impressive building consisting of a grid of 3 by 4 funnels, some 20 meters high, built from massive concrete. As part of the transformation process from an active production unit to a cultural heritage, some of the funnels have been partially cut through and connected with a walkway, allowing visitors to experience the inside of a structure which usually is not accessible. Strong lasers create additional pyramids of light, made visible via fog. The cold precision of the intensively luminous planes is broken by the unpredictable spatial expansion of the smoke from the fog machines, rigid geometry meets random variation and chaotic behaviour. The intensity and texture of the light changes over time, the system oscillates in a very slow multidimensional movement.

© Studio Robert Henke

Klangwelle is an installation featuring 10 motorized pendulums including 10 loudspeakers at their ends to discover the structure and spatial impact of dynamic waves within an audiovisual area. The generative shapes are inspired by physicist Ernst Mach’s pendulum wave experiments.

Every place tells it’s own story. Like a common threat a single cello note combines a variety of soundscapes to a floating stream of urban information. By comparing several places, their acoustic identities become apparent. The quadrophonic installation Berlin 201 Hz represents the rich auditory diversity of the capital’s urban soundscape.

Fundamental Forces is a collaborative audiovisual installation and performance project by Robert Henke and Tarik Barri. Complex visual shapes and sonic structures emerge as the result of repeated, simple mathematical operations to form an abstract world of floating objects in deep virtual space. Fundamental Forces references notions of physics that describe how our universe is constructed. This inspiration induces a reinterpretation of reality that is strongly infused with a subjective, aesthetic view and gives rise to the narrative of a parallel universe governed by manmade rules. By using self-written and continuously enhanced software, Fundamental Forces not only creates what people hear and see but also builds the foundations of what they could experience in the future. Henke and Barri build a machine that constitutes a class of potential installations. Each screening is a snapshot of the current development. Technically it is a prerendered ultra high definition ultra wide-screen projection with surround sound.

© Tarik Barri

The work Am Puls is inspired by Gabriele Sitrls serial partiture at the subway station "Spichernstraße" in Berlin.
Several surround-recordings taken from the subwaystation are transferred into a hallway of the University of Arts at the Bundesalle nearby the station.
Synced by the subway schedule and based on the incoming and outgoing movements of the train, an algorithmic composition occurs in the art building.

The generative piece has been presented weekly on a randomly chosen day at the Udk hallway. It has been open for the public between 2014 and 2018. The moving soundpiece was created for an array of twelve speakers along the hallway.

Created for a ring of 96 speakers the composition behaves like a massive clockwork. The wavefieldsynthesis system allows to immerse a visitor into an invisible sound world. Inspired by the delicate mechanics of a clockwork a complex soundscape slowly rises up. Only with his ears the listener discovers a multilayered machine from the inside. As part of the group exhibition Pulse Lab II the piece was awarded with a Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, Linz, AU (2013).

The interactive system tracks down the moving leaves in front of the large scale windows separating the foyer at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele from the outside. An algorithmic logic converts the movements in realtime into control signals for a dedicated sample library. The audio archive is based on old sound-recordings that have been taken during the last 40 years of the annual jazz festival at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Compositorial changes of the piece are linked to the streaming winds outside the building.

The piece extracts the historical function of the building and converts it into a contemporary context. As part of the exhibition Lebensräume a 5 min long live recording of the realtime system has been shown at Ars Electronica, Linz, AU in 2012.

Musicbook was the practical result of my bachelor thesis. It dealt with the conception and the prototypical realization of a musical interface by converting an empty book into a digital storage medium. The interaction worked via a self-made infrared-pen that made it possible to “draw” virtual music notes into the book.

The musical principle was based on a “step-sequencer” which offered the creation of musical patterns in real-time. By projecting the music-partiture into a traditional medium a new method of musical interface could be experienced. In my thesis I walked along the complete creative path beginning from a conceptional idea up to the final realization of a working prototype.

The lecture introduces underlying educational ideals and artistic positions of the Bauhaus School in Germany before world war II. Afterwards we imagine how these principles may be applied into current creative practices.

Together we are searching for cultural and technological patterns that may lead us to a definition of a (not yet established) imaginary Bauhaus 3.0 movement.

Get an inside view of the concepts behind musical environments that are open for (physical-)interaction. Understand the fundamentals of how to make use of algorithms to create generative sound systems. Based on a set of machine learning examples as well as other sonification techniques you learn how to incorporate these intelligent systems into your musical creations.

You will be introduced to the basic ideas behind neural networks and their possibilities in musical applications. In a next step, based on your field of interest we are exploring generative concepts helping us to compose, design and integrate sound into your creative processes.

The advanced seminar spatial installations focusses on fundamential questions about the phenomenological perception of sound wihtin a three dimensional context. We discuss a collection of technical and creative strategies leading to the creation of own spatial sound experiences. The final results will be exhibited in a variety of established cultural instutions in the area of Darmstadt.

How can we compose sonic environments that allow others to interact with? What are algorithms and how can we make use of them to create generative (sound-)systems step by step? How can we catch information from the outside world and connect them to our compositions within the computer?

Built on the well documented coding environment Max MSP and Ableton Live we'll develop individual projects based on each participants area of interest.

The lecture gave an introduction into German culture. After the seminar there was an open discussion about the differences/similiarities of German/Japanese youth and art culture.