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 generate a variety of soft sounds or pulsating movements. They are developed using 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 harvest energy from light to produce pulsed motion. The Solar Sound module (invented by Ralf Schreiber) emits a variety of gentle 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 transformations: Creatures Sextet, Ensemble and Orchestra. The performing synthesis was determined after an intensive period of observation of the interrelated sound patterns that occurred between specifically connected modules in series receiving controlled light intensity. 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 reproducing and maintaining itself]. The light sources are thus 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 web. Thus, 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. The result of this symbiosis or contiguity of the self with the same is, therefore, a matter of actively maintaining fairly changing conditions of survival or methodising the intention of confronting oneself or becoming the object of the observer's gaze in the panopticon from a deterministically unpredictable point of view.