Creatures
Performances 2012 - 2014
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Creatures Cluster
Site-specific installations
2014 -  in progress

Free-form oscillator circuits, metal wires, lights, jumper wires, Axoloti core
 
The 1st installation (2014) was a co-production of HISK and Overtoon

Credits to Johannes Taelman (Axoloti Platform),
Ralf Schreiber & Christian Faubel

The Creatures are autonomous modules that draw their energy from light to produce a variety of soft sounds or pulsating movements. They are inspired by BEAM robotics (from biology, electronics, aesthetics and mechanics), i.e. minimal robots that use a set of analogue circuits that mimic biological neurons to facilitate the robot's response to its environment. The Suneater (invented by Mark Tilden) is a circuit designed to harvest energy from light to generate pulsed motion. The Solar Sound Module (invented by Ralf Schreiber) emits a variety of soft sounds depending on the intensity of light received by its solar cell. As it is impossible to reproduce identical circuits, each Creature is unique.
The project began in 2012 with sound performances in various formations: Creatures Sextet, Ensemble and Orchestra. The performing synthesis was determined after intensive periods of observing the interrelated patterns between the connected modules under controlled light intensities. The output was an amalgam of structured improvisation elicited by manipulated light sources, while the generated sound patterns were amplified and mixed live. The final performance took place at transmediale 2014, and from then on the project moved towards greater autonomy through the realisation of site-specific installations.

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The Creatures Cluster is an apparatus of interconnected modules and light sources that reciprocally affect each other. As a web built entirely in space, the sculptural, kinetic and acoustic nature of the synthesis refers to an open nervous system, a symbiotic system or an ecosystem. From an anti-authoritarian point of view, and in preserving the autonomous, organic and self-sustaining nature of the cluster, no programming is used to trigger interactions. Instead, the modules and light sources are directly connected to evoke light intensities that register changes in the oscillatory activity of the cluster, in line with the concept of autopoiesis [a system capable of producing and maintaining itself in unitary space, usually by incorporating and transforming energy, information and/or matter from its external environment]. Here the light sources are organically integrated into the functioning of the cluster, which is fed by and fed back into the oscillatory activity of the creatures. As a result, the system is constantly responding to changing conditions, creating new patterns of light and oscillation, and the causal reasoning continues ad infinitum between potential chaos and homeostasis.

In this artificial coexistence of electronic modules, created by the ramifications of the matrix code, the cluster as an organism, and each individual creature as an organ, become available and vulnerable to all combinations, to all connections, to all modifications. It even becomes its own antibody by overturning its defences, by unravelling its code, so that it always escapes forms of representation, always shifts its sources of origin, carries its voice from a single body into a network. Thus, while homeostasis appears as an impossible state, an improbable condition, its eventual attainment in the symbolic world is offered as catharsis and meaning to programmed machines and humans. The result of this symbiosis and sympoiesis of modules and environments is therefore a matter of actively maintaining fairly changing conditions of survival, or of methodising the intention to confront life in order to sustain itself from a deterministically unpredictable point of view.