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Polymorph I is a confluence between forms of matter and generative Ai models, constituting emergent structures in motion, water, projection, print, light and sound.

With cameras, microphones and conductive hair as sensors, generated sound and light are entangled with the presence of observers and the proximal environment, in ways which transform the fixed trajectory of generative Ai models into dynamic flows of sensorial immersion.

 

Data jumps fluidly across tangible and mediated modes: sound, light, motion and electricity blend into one another at different time scales according to an open logic of connection.

 

Polymorph I is a curious deviation from developing conventions in generative Ai into expanded conditions of production and experience.

 

2023, SZN Gallery, London. Projection, sound, code, electronics, print, generative Ai.

 

Produced by Maggie Mer, Sonia Bernac, and Jeremy Keenan as a part of AidLab at the Royal College of Art under the direction of Johnny Golding. Special thanks to Adam at SZN.

material as dither, dither as material

https://github.com/jeremy-keenan/dither-tremble-leap-continue

Compound Terrains, by Tom Slater and Jeremy Keenan, is an audiovisual work that emerged from an interrogation of three dimensional audiovisual spatialisation technologies and their role in the production so-called virtual and disembodied spaces. 

By converging laser beam projections with simple graphics and the immersive the audio capabilities of Budapest's 4D sound system, this installation induces an ambiguity of multistable, digital/physical and dis/embodied space. These hybrid spaces suggest different regimes of synaesthesia, knitting sensations together in varying proportions. 

This version of compound Terrains was first shown in April of 2019 at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest, Hungary. It consists of 24 lasers, 48 channel sound, and a single video projector.

A 3.5 metre by 2 metre video screen was positioned at the end of the gallery creating the illusion that the laser array continues beyond the confines of the physical space.

This installation is 35m long by 22m wide.

Compound Terrains
Scattered Rotations

Scattered Rotations evokes a body suspended within a perpetual overabundance of disjunctive signals in light and sound. The mirrorball 'dances' in response to external signals, but never towards any kind of regular cyclical motion. 

Like a phonograph starting up from zero speed but failing to rotate for long enough to complete a verse, phrase, or song, the sound follows its motion, reproducing the sound according to its fractured timeline.

Simultaneously generating and responding to motion, light and sound, Scattered Rotations produces an inescapable loop wherein the object becomes both the sender and receiver of warped transmissions that constantly transform but never terminate. At its state of potential rest, it is repeatedly impelled to continue this endless cycle of broadcast and reception.

 

The pendulously flung mirrorball bends the light and sound around it, while microphone, light, and orientation sensors register this scattered motion and perpetuate its tangled loop. The interplay which emerges from the disparate elements integrated in Scattered Rotations constitutes a system collapsed into a state of fractured disconnection.

50cm mirrorball, elastic band, microphone, custom audio programming and electronics, high-power servomotors, light sensors, accelerometer, 'disco' samples, sound system, scaffold.

Originally presented in 13 channel sound at Call & Response, London, UK 2017.

 

Garden of Signals

Garden of Signals expands upon the use of audio feedback in earlier sound works, forming an autonomous sonic artwork that uses feedback as a sound material and as a process.

Like pieces such as Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968), and Microphone by David Tudor (1973), or the later work of Agostino Di Scipio, Garden of Signals is born from material possibilities at the heart of sound reproduction.

Garden of Signals was initiated with an interest in remote signals, such as mobile telephones, and how they affect the movement of human bodies in physical space when we respond to them. The pervasive multitude of distant signals appears to be a random and invisible process, but has a tangible influence on the domain of the flesh.

The loudness of the feedback coming from each of the 6 speakers is measured, and then influences the movement of each guitar pickup, which further changes the fluctuating loudness of the feedback coming out of the speakers.

In this way, the collective relationship between the sound from the speakers and the movement of the guitar pickups creates continuously shifting patterns of sound. 
Garden of Signals was realised within the framework of the 2012 Artist-in-residence Program of the Gas Natural Fenosa Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, and subsequently exhibited at the Sonic Arts Award in Rome.

 

Guitar pickups, speakers, motors, purpose-built code. October/November 2013.

Camera by Juan Lesta: esferobite.com/dsk/

Mouth to Ear

The strange confluence of a moving speaker cone, modified microphones, muted low-frequency feedback and code, Mouth to Ear is a generative audio composition exploring the tonal possibilities of feedback combined with the element of chance in an unstable interaction of changing physical quantities.

Developed specifically for the Call & Response 3D sound system, the work plays with aspects of broadcast, reception, and reproduction around the human response to systems of communication and their pervasive signal networks.

Mouth to Ear is part of a series initiated by the piece Ear to Mouth and continuing with Light Loop, Oscillations in Love and Light and Garden of Signals.

 

Originally presented in 13 channel sound at Call & Response, London, UK 2016.

‘Since many people feel compelled to broadcast, one finds oneself in a state of permanent receptivity’ – Siegfried Kracauer, 1927

Crystal Glass Mirror Stone

Crystal Glass Mirror Stone represents a culmination of techniques and explorations in feedback and is inspired by its relationship to life process and flow. Each of the pieces are based around a single recording of audio feedback derived from a self-oscillating system consisting of modified light-sensitive speakers and computer controlled lights.

 

The results were generated using algorithmic structures based on feedback-modelled relationships between different musical parts with minimal structural editing. Crystal Glass Mirror Stone traverses the space between tonal structure and timbral dissonance, sometimes erratically, treating pitched audio feedback as a single tonal unit. There is a periodic narrative to the series, with each recording being subsequently transformed by the next iteration of the process.

 

Crystal Glass Mirror Stone was presented at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna as hosted by Austrian sound collective TONSPUR, Spazioersetti in Udine, Italy, Cafe OTO in London and Call & Response space at Enclave in South London, where it was auditioned in 13 channel sound.

Oscillations in Love and Light

From animal populations to business structures, from global economics to human love, many domains are subject to the possibility of being modelled as feedback systems.

 

In particular, the study of cybernetics takes these subjects to be conceived as interconnected feedback loops between different agents and their environment.

Similarly, feedback is both a possible error inherent in an audio system, a scheme that regulates audio amplifiers, as well as the basis for simple control systems like thermostats.

 

Oscillations in Love and Light takes these ideas as its premise, focusing in particular on the coupling of audio feedback with the notion of modelling human love relationships as continuous feedback loops: two ‘love objects’ imagined as interacting contours in light and sound.

 

The idea is based on prevalent demonstrations of systems dynamics using models of fictional love storiesOscillations in Love and Light was loosely modelled on the relationship between the two main characters of 'Gone With the Wind'.

 

The piece consists of modified audio amplifiers with light-sensitive feedback, digitally controlled lights, and purpose-built audio processing code.

 

At Titanik Gallery in Turku, Finland, 2013.

Scripts

Scripts is a collection of 4 pieces based around sounds and techniques recorded from and utilised in various physical works, but taking the form of fixed-media music.

Released in 2017 on For/wind.

Ear to Mouth

Ear to Mouth is a single speaker as an animated feedback object, with four microphones and a speaker creating feedback and controlling the motion of the speaker, which in turn defines the level of the feedback, which then influences the movement of the speaker, which again controls the level of feedback. The feedback is processed using a live digital input which is also influenced by the motion of the speaker and the sound it produces.

This work seeks to imagine the speaking and listening body distilled to a conversation between its basic elements - the ear and the mouth.
 
Speaker, motors, microphones, microcontroller, custom code. 

Originally presented in 5 channel sound at Goldsmiths College, London, UK 2009.

North Sea Crossing

North Sea Crossing and River Lee Navigation are two pieces based on recordings made crossing the North Sea by ferry and a boat journey on the London River Lee Navigation. Waves, engines, birds, voices, all processed by various degrees to form the composition. Sharp contrast is interchanged with slow evolution, the structure of the piece being informed by both the immediate timbre of the sounds, as well as through the interpretation of abstract external reference to elements such as the changing velocity of the craft, the perceived turbulence of the water, and the opening and closing of locks on the river. These compositional decisions were made freely, mostly in relation to my own memories of each journey.

 

Themes of motion and transportation motivate these pieces. Certeau’s description of the perceptual distortion occurring in train journeys is especially close to the experience of travel inspiring North Sea Crossing and River Lee Navigation. Between the confined, static space of the train and its hyper-mobile exterior, there resounds:

 

"a sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points of their frontier. These junctions have no place…they can only be heard as a single stream of sounds, so continuous is the tearing off that annihilates the points through which it passes."

 

North Sea Crossing was presented in 8 channel sound. at James Taylor Gallery, London, UK 2010. 

 

 

172 Warning Bells

172 Warning Bells is a generative audio work that seeks to question the relationship between power and sound production. Audio material is drawn from Emergency Alert Signal tones, the same tones to be heard in the event of an emergency through the 172 sirens in and around the Indian Point Plant, a nuclear plant just outside New York City. The plant supplies around one third of the city’s power. Many of the sounds heard as part of the piece have been processed and transformed using Supercollider with power consumption of the installation itself informing which sounds are heard. The piece was originally conceived and presented in 8 channel sound at Scholes Gallery as part of Code of Contingency, New York, USA 2012.

 

35MW

35MW is a generative, 4 channel sound installation first presented at Agency Gallery in South London, UK, using the SELCHP electricity plant as a data source.
 

The SELCHP is a major incineration plant located in South Bermondsey near the gallery. Data from the power output of the plant and power consumption of the gallery is used to inform the resultant audio of the work at any given time. As such 35MW is a sonic representation of the energy consumed by the works in the show throughout its duration. 

 

ACHz

Raw and treated magnetic pickup recordings from components of the audio system generating the work itself (power supplies, laptops). 

 

Magnetic coil pickups are placed on each of 4 speakers. A generative feedback-based system plays back the recordings based on the analysed output of the speakers. 

 

Magnetic pickups, preamplifiers, SuperCollider code.

River Lee Navigation

North Sea Crossing and River Lee Navigation are two pieces based on recordings made crossing the North Sea by ferry and a boat journey on the London River Lee Navigation. Waves, engines, birds, voices, all processed by various degrees to form the composition. Sharp contrast is interchanged with slow evolution, the structure of the piece being informed by both the immediate timbre of the sounds, as well as through the interpretation of abstract external reference to elements such as the changing velocity of the craft, the perceived turbulence of the water, and the opening and closing of locks on the river. These compositional decisions were made freely, mostly in relation to my own memories of each journey.

 

Themes of motion and transportation motivate these pieces. Certeau’s description of the perceptual distortion occurring in train journeys is especially close to the experience of travel inspiring North Sea Crossing and River Lee Navigation. Between the confined, static space of the train and its hyper-mobile exterior, there resounds:

 

"a sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points of their frontier. These junctions have no place…they can only be heard as a single stream of sounds, so continuous is the tearing off that annihilates the points through which it passes."

 

River Lee Navigation was presented at Roundhouse, London as a part of NetAudioLondon in 8 channel sound. The piece was later presented in 12 channel sound as a part of Sho-Zyg at St. James Hatcham Church, London.

 

 

London Subterraneous

Artist Jacob Kirkegaard and Jeremy Keenan with sonic arts collective Call & Response collaborated to create a sound installation that invites the audience to experience the hidden underworld of London’s water system, originally presented in 13 channel sound.

 

The project takes the work of seventeenth century alchemist and scientist Athanasius Kircher as inspiration. Kircher was a polymath and inventor, who researched fields as diverse as medicine and Egyptology, and designed and constructed wondrous sound and vision automatons. These included a collection of so called speaking statues whose spiral mouths would lead out into the streets of Rome like giant trumpets. In this way the speaking trumpets or ‘hearing lens’ would reveal the cacophony of Rome to the listener. London Subterraneous aims to link Kircher’s ‘speaking trumpets’ with his fascination of geology and underground reverberations and find a way to explore London’s mundus subterraneous.

 

For this project, special microphones were used to access sounds from a series of “stink pipes” that connect the city’s familiar terrestrial environment to a lesser-known complex network of sewers and rivers below. The towering, hollow pipes, now rusting fixtures dotted across London erected as safety valves to vent excess toxic gases along a newly built Victorian sewer network in the 1860s allow us to connect through our past and eavesdrop on the capital’s underground world. The resultant exhibition is a portrait of some of the sounds created below ground and through the pipes themselves.

 

Jacob Kirkegaard said: 

“Although these stink pipes are nowadays "useless" this work aims to reveal them as poles of sound, or as singing flutes. In a way these are tones from the past."

Light Loop

Light Loop consists of a room full of 16 guitar amplifiers,16 guitar pickups modified with light sensors, a motor controlled moving head lamp, 4 amplitude sensors and a microcontroller.

The light from the moving lamp shines on the light sensors, causing feedback at the amplifiers.

 

The feedback is picked up by the amplitude sensors, which control the movement of the lamp. The changing light from the lamp causes new patterns of audio feedback, which trigger subsequent movement of the lamp...

 

Immaterial

Immaterial utilises sound garnered from the Institute of Making in London, with direct recordings of engineered materials exposing the raw process of The title track utilises sound garnered from the Institute of Making in London, with direct recordings of engineered materials exposing the raw process of extracting the composition from recorded sound.

 

Immaterial  is inspired by the tension between the concrete presence of material objects and the affective experience of them as things in the the world.

 

Special thanks to Zoe Laughlin from the Institute of Making.

 

Auditioned with Call & Response as a part of Hearing Shapes, Bethnal Green Library, 2012. originally presented in 8 channel sound.

Named for Alvin Lucier’s 1969 sound work I am Sitting in a Room, this piece engages with aspects of sound recording practice, cultural preservation and perceptions of nature, as well as notions of ownership and distribution of media in relation to social space.

 

The work was created from 3 sound recordings made at the Wysing Arts Centre, played back in different spaces and re-recorded multiple times, allowing material features of the recording process and the space of audition to seep back into the domain of listening, reversing the conventional relationship between signal and noise, whereby the presence of the medium normally erases itself. The sound artist's 'Stairway to Heaven'. Obligatory rendition.

 

With Matt Lewis, for Call & Response.

I am Standing in a Field
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