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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Thanks to the Instruo module SCÍON, which is a biofeedback sensor built into a quad random voltage generator based on the MidiSprout by Datagarden, the biofeedback data gathered from the plant are transformed into musically useful control signals, like CV and gates. Tiny fluctuations in surface conductance on the leaves stimulate control voltage and gate signal changes that are used to modulate and control all the modules of the eurorack synth. The CV and gates are also sent to the CV-to-MIDI module Sweet Sixteen by Tesseract to be transformed into MIDI CC (control changes) and sent to the Korg OpSix, where they modulate the FM operators ratio and the synth FXs.

The result is an ever-changing, sweet and intense, composition that leads the listener to the secret worlds generated by the plant, and by the succession of micro and macro phenomena.

Everything in the Universe is strictly intertwined, and we believe that if we could hear this entanglement, this would be the sound.

“The Secret Music Of Plants” first version was Recorded Live on Saturday 1 June 2019 at the Japanese Garden in Duthie Park, Aberdeen, for the event “Sonic // Art // Botanical Garden” organized by Wagon.

Audrey The Plant: Bio-feedback module Scíon by Instruō
Marta NoOne: Guitar, Fx, Modular Synthesizer, Loops
Ugo Vantini: Synbals (Synthesized Cymbals connected with the Modular Synth via contact microphones)

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Thanks to the Instruo module SCÍON, which is a biofeedback sensor built into a quad random voltage generator based on the MidiSprout by Datagarden, the biofeedback data gathered from the plant are transformed into musically useful control signals, like CV and gates. Tiny fluctuations in surface conductance on the leaves stimulate control voltage and gate signal changes that are used to modulate and control all the modules of the eurorack synth. The CV and gates are also sent to the CV-to-MIDI module Sweet Sixteen by Tesseract to be transformed into MIDI CC (control changes) and sent to the Korg OpSix, where they modulate the FM operators ratio and the synth FXs.

The result is an ever-changing, sweet and intense, composition that leads the listener to the secret worlds generated by the plant, and by the succession of micro and macro phenomena.

Everything in the Universe is strictly intertwined, and we believe that if we could hear this entanglement, this would be the sound.

“The Secret Music Of Plants” first version was Recorded Live on Saturday 1 June 2019 at the Japanese Garden in Duthie Park, Aberdeen, for the event “Sonic // Art // Botanical Garden” organized by Wagon.

Audrey The Plant: Bio-feedback module Scíon by Instruō
Marta NoOne: Guitar, Fx, Modular Synthesizer, Loops
Ugo Vantini: Synbals (Synthesized Cymbals connected with the Modular Synth via contact microphones)

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