What do you get if you gather as many iPhones as possible and let them play with each other? A huge musical organism that is not only self-organizing, but also evolving with the sound environment.
Enter the new generation: Bacterial Orchestra - Public Epidemic No 1 (2009).
Above is a first test of the prototype - with only a few cells.
Right now we’re showing the installation at the art biennale “emoção art.ficial 4.0″ in São Paulo. The theme of the year is “Emergencia!” - which of course suits us perfect. The biennale will run until the 14th of september.
Read more about emoção art.ficial 4.0 here. Other artists are Roman Kirschner (Germany), Miguel Chevalier (Mexico) and LAb[au] (Belgium) - among others.
Check the column to the right for articles and tv-features (but only in Portuguese!).
The biennale is organized by Itaú Cultural.
We will show Bacterial Orchestra in our home town for the first time. The exhibition is called “Changing Matters - the Resilience Art Exhibition” and is shown in addition to the international science and policy conference “Resilience, Adaption and Transformation in Turbulent times”.
The open source art-festival Piksel in Bergen/Norway has just finished. We had a lot of fun and met loads of interesting people. A big thanks to the organizers!
But it’s not over yet. The exhibition is open until the 16th of December. Check gallery 3,14 if you happen to be in Bergen.
Go ahead and click for more pictures and a short interview…
A big thanks to David, Marcus, Henriette, Antje and all of you who came for the opening at gallery Takt in Berlin last Saturday. We had a lot of fun! Hope you had too.
And to all of you that didn’t have time to show up: the installation is up for six weeks. Check the web site for opening hours and how to get there.
More pictures after the jump.
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It’s been quiet for a while. We’ve been in the lab working with the installation. (Which in this case means the attic of Martin’s new house.)
Bacterial Orchestra is an evolutionary organism - even in between exhibitions. Right now we’re trying to incorporate the concept of melody. The idea is to make every cell listen for pitch and then use that information to shape phrases together with the other cells in an ever evolving fugue.
But the basic concept is still the same: simple cells that communicate creating a complex whole.
We also have two new exhibitions coming up. First there is the Norberg Festival in Sweden, 27-28 of july. Then we go to Berlin and Takt Kunstprojektraum. The exhibition runs from 18th of august until 29th of september. Make sure you come to the opening (18th of august) if you want to talk to us about the installation. Or anything else…
At the grand opening of Bacterial Orchestra at New Media Meeting in Norrköping all expectations were surpassed. Our organism truly had a life of its own. It developed to be resistant still adaptive. It rarely did what we expected.
The experiment was conducted in a underground corridor in connection to the other activities. The laborative site was perfect. The reverberation from the naked stone walls and the concrete floor transported weak sounds to distant cells.
A constant dripping from the roof provided a constant, silent base rhythm for the organism when the organism was left in silence.
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After tweaking the last bits and pieces the Bacterial Orchestra is now alive! From listening to it and playing around with it for just a few hours, we can tell you that this thing really has a life on it’s own.
Sometimes it clicks and sparkles really quietly, and beautifully we must say. At times it roars with distorted feedback making all the cells scream together. (We haven’t got a clue where the feedback comes from…)
At one point it even played the two first notes in a major chord. That was so scary Olle got tangled up in a loudspeaker and crashed it to the floor.
If you’ve missed it: we’re showing Bacterial Orchestra the 1-2 december in Norrköping.
Yep, here we go! Roll out the red carpet. Uncork that Champagne. Bacterial Orchestra is officially on the move. The world wide sound pandemic has begun.
We will show Bacterial Orchestra for the very first time in the beginning of next month in Norrköping (1-2 December). The event is called New Media Meeting and it’s a Sónar-like arrangement with the arty stuff (us!) during daytime - and the party stuff at night (Dibaba for example).
They have a brilliant program with lots of interesting workshops and wet pumping techno. Don’t you dare to miss it!