As Broadway World writes “The arts and sciences are often seen as disparate practices, but they are closer cousins than many may think: from tales of scientific discovery littered throughout history to the countless artists who have taken inspiration from the romance and mystery of the cosmos. This year’s Edinburgh Science Festival is dedicated to showing the many ways in which the arts and sciences are interconnected – two sides of the same coin often learning from one another to reach deeper connection and collective enlightenment – and to providing a platform for creatives to showcase their work.

Amanda Tyndall, Festival and Creative Director at Edinburgh Science said: “Art and science are both highly creative endeavours and the Festival each year aims to celebrate this creativity and the people that make it possible, connecting audiences with important science topics in innovative ways to deliver not just facts but emotional connections.”

Art also finds its way into the exhibition programme with the DATASPHERE exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland featuring artwork by Scottish artists Alan Brown and Silent Chaos, both supported by PLACE (Platforms for Creative Excellence Programme) funding.

Every human being has become a living set of data and a potential content creator. Thanks to Silent Chaos, the Museum’s Grand Gallery becomes a bespoke information collector, gathering data from the people visiting and the activities occurring here, via a network of different sensors, which are distributed around the space and visualised live on this screen.”

Download the Science Festival programme here.

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In the present world, every human being has become a living set of data, and potentially a content creator. With Human AutomatArt, we are transforming Aberdeen’s Music Hall into an information collector, gathering data from the human activities occurring there, via movement detection, sound and temperature sensors, whose data are generating the digital painting on the screen. Doing so, the unaware human beings become the autonomous agents whose behaviours create the structure for the generative art program, and the human life and related activities as a whole become the painting artist.

The project’s name Human AutomatArt is a mixing of the words-concepts Human, Cellular Automata and Art. Using the logic at the root of AI programming, we want to humanise this process, using the human beings as “cellular automata”, independent unities with different behaviours which interact with their environment and can generate an interesting emergent complexity, which is going to create a complex piece of visual art.

The idea flourished while we were reasoning around the digital world and the importance of data, and how to let interact the real-life analog world with the digital one in an artistic way. The use of sensors was the obvious choice.

We imagined transforming the Music Hall into a living harvester of data: using a webcam as a movement detector, an Arduino board with a temperature sensor, and an audio connection from the main hall, all connected via Ethernet cables to the main computer, we collect all those data that are driving the behaviour of the generative art program made in TouchDesigner.

People’s interaction works if they are completely unaware of how their behaviour is driving the program because one of the essential criteria of the generative art is that the system needs to be autonomous: independent of outside control, free of any guiding hand. If the human agents are acting unaware, or uninterested, in the effects their actions are having on the system, they become as valid a data source as any other autonomous object. What we want to accomplish with this project is to take a step back from the overwhelming technology and insert the human being in a process that is usually computer-driven, using the technology as a means, not as an end, with the human activity regaining central role.

Our latest projects all involve sensors; the autogenerative series The secret music of plants, which involves a plant connected to the modular synthesizer through biofeedback sensors, with the plant that is generating music through the synthesizer; Aletheia, that is Marta’s Master’s in Sonic Art’s final project, a quadriphonic interactive composition for custom-built EEG devices, which involves EEG sensors and Arduino to generate music in Pure Data using brainwaves. The “Human AutomatArt” project is the logical consequence of these works.

The technique used is that of the feedback loops we have already used in “Nocturne on Ganimede”, but enhanced and enriched, to generate this effect of 3D coloured ink that is coming out of the screen.

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The unique soundscape of “L’Oscuro Oceano dello Spazio Infinito” has been composed having in mind the sound generated by the movement, the rhythm, the sound and the play of light on the water of the Marischal College’s fountain. Using delayed and reverberated tinkling glass sounds, random electronic sound patterns, deep and dark slowly evolving atmospheres, and enigmatic choir drones, we imagined how the deep space would sound like, and, by the alchemic motto “as above so below”, we explored how the sound of the “above” would merge and play with the sound of the “below”, here symbolised by the water games of the fountain.

This concept was generated from our reasoning around the originating substances of matter. Having a Mediterranean and classical culture, our mind went immediately to greek mythology in which Oceanus and Tethys were the primaeval parents of the gods, and so the origins of all things, and the upper and lower waters which were then separated to create the heaven and the earth, also paralleling the story of Apsu and Tiamat in the Babylonian cosmogony. Also, Thales, the ancient Greek philosopher, arrived at the same conclusion by the use of reasoning, observing how ‘that the nurture of all creatures is moist, and that warmth itself is generated from moisture and lives by it; and that from which all things come to be is their first principle’.

The composition will be rotating as follows:

August

21-27 August: Ross Whyte
28-3 September: Silent Chaos

September

4-10 September: Bea Dawkins
11-17 September: Pippa Murphy
18-24 September: Ross Whyte
25-1 October: Silent Chaos

October

2-8 October: Bea Dawkins
9–15 October: Pippa Murphy
16-17 October: Ross Whyte
18 October: Silent Chaos
19 October: Bea Dawkins
20 October: Pippa Murphy
21 October: Ross Whyte
22 October: Silent Chaos
23 October: Bea Dawkins
24 October: Pippa Murphy

Aberdeen City Council has advised us that the fountains are currently operational between 8am – 10pm Monday-Sunday. Please note that due to an ongoing issue, the fountains may be switched off from time to time.

Evening Express article here.

Aberdeen City Council infos for BAS9 here.

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