Creatures
Performances 2012 - 2014

Creatures Cluster
Site-specific installations
2014 -  in progress

Free-form oscillator circuits, metal wires, lights, jumper wires, Axoloti core
 
The 1st installation, March 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 generate a variety of soft sounds or pulsing movements. They are developed with two simple analogue oscillator circuits inspired by living organisms: the Suneater and the Solar Sound. The Suneater (invented by Mark Tilden) is a circuit designed to gather energy from light to produce pulsed motion. The Solar Sound module (invented by Ralf Schreiber) produces a wide variety of gentle sounds depending on the intensity of light received by its solar cell. Since it is impossible to create identical circuits, each Creature is unique.

The project started in 2012 with sound performances in different trans-formations: Creatures Sextet, Ensemble, Orchestra. The performing synthesis was determined after an intensive observational period of the interrelated sound patterns occurring between specifically connected modules in series receiving controlled light intensity. The output was an amalgam of structured improvisation elicited through manipulated light sources, while the generated sound patterns were amplified and mixed live. The last performance took place at transmediale 2014 and from then on the project moved towards greater autonomy, through the implementation 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 a rather anti-authoritarian point of view, as well as to preserve the autonomous, organic and self-sustaining nature of the Cluster, there is no programming applied to effectuate interactions. Instead, the modules and light sources are directly connected to evoke light intensities that register changes in the oscillatory activity of the system in accordance with the concept of autopoiesis [a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself]. Thus, the light sources are organically integrated into the functioning of the Cluster that is fed by and feeds back into the oscillating activity of the Creatures. As a result, the system constantly responds to the varying conditions which create new light and oscillating patterns, and the causal reasoning continues ad infinitum between potential chaos and homeostasis.

Within this artificial coexistence of electronic modules spawning through ramifications from the matrix code, the new Cluster, as an organism, and each individual Creature, as a new organ, becomes available and vulnerable to all combinations, to all connections, to all modifications. It even becomes its own antibody by an overturning of its defences, by an unravelling of its code, so that it always escapes forms of representation, always shifts its sources of origin, away from the soil of its birth, from a single body into a nexus or always disembodied within its embodiment. Such is the case that, while homeostasis appears as an impossible state, an improbable condition, its eventual attainment in the symbolic world is offered as catharsis and significance to programmed machines such as humans and computers. The result of this symbiosis or contiguity of the self with the same is therefore a matter of actively maintaining fairly changing conditions for survival or preservation or methodizing the intention to confront oneself or become the object of the observer’s gaze in the Panopticon from a deterministically unpredictable point of view.