Pitch Volume 3: Edge Condition: Art & Architecture

The Acid House

Merjin Royaards & Andrew Walker
Synthesis:
This project is a super-imposition/ cross-pollination of research into pioneering multi-sensory
experiments, specifically the sonic works of the Soviet Projectionists, investigating the spatial and
transformative properties of sound, and architectural theories of hacking perception and
indeterminacy in spatial awareness.
Our Aim:
Through the construction of an interactive hybrid installation, fusing digital and analogue
technologies (open-source coding (arduino), with signal generators etc), new auditory-spatial
relationships are explored in order to engender a more active perception and occupation of spaces.
Proposal / System =
.a network of interactive robotic dancers sense and translate occupant behaviour into a
disruptive choreography, which in turn generates a reflexive, intangible, sonic sub-architecture of
signal patterns. The resultant signals are modulated, creating a cascade of sound and light that
bends, distorts and filters waves as they engage with each other and the architecture (its material,
structure, acoustics); waves whose altered timbre, pitch and amplitude in turn transform users
experience of the space. This interplay between sound and space can be thought of as a form of
signal processing, creating new fields of orchestrated chance.
As designers, we embrace the aleatoric impulse (inspired by the likes of Lynda Benglis
uncontrolled poured sculptures and Barry Le Vas random distributions), in order to question
notions of spatial authorship (of increasing importance in digital art). By allowing for uncertainty and
random process in spatial production the Acid House becomes an open ended piece, whose multi-
sensory composition is displaced to spontaneously co-ordinated distributions of signal and
occupancy. As a result, the architecture is transformed into a reflexive, aleatoric instrument,
perpetually producing new perceptual conditions through enabling a more creative occupation.


In Progress:
(Attached are images of the robotic devices and the analogue array (responsible for signal
generation / manipulation. The project is to be tested and installed in the top two floors of a
partially dilapidated town-house in North London within the next 4-6 weeks. We will document the
installation and its performances as part of our ongoing research which we feel would provide a
unique insight into the synthesis of art and architecture).



(signal production tests)




(examples of robotic dancers)