Artus Contemporary Art Studio, Contactspace, Budapest
27 November 2019 – 7 January 2020
Binaura is a Budapest based collective that is building software based interfaces, physical installations using free and open source tools since the early 2000s. They gave international workshops across the EU, Canada and India in the felds of interaction modalities, creative coding and algorithmic art. Their works are focusing on interaction, cognitive aspects of extended perception, prototyping and open source exchange of ideas.
Their latest exhibition features a forest made of hanging papers with generative plotter drawings, a one dimensional cellular shell pattern generator, an audiovisual projection mapping installation, and a drawing robot, based on poetic artificial intelligence that generates nonconventional prophecies for the audience upon request.
© Photos: Ferenc Eln
1. 00011110
A thermal printer and a microcontroller generates lines of an image on a stripe of paper, infinitely. The printer and the controller are mounted on top of a loudspeaker. The delay time is different between each printed line, that results to an organic rythym that never repeats itself. Since the sound of the printer is amplified, it also generates a minimalistic percussion-like soundscape. The endless image is a discrete model: a one dimensional cellular automata with varying rules in its evolution. The paper stripe forms an ever growing heap on the ground during the whole exhibition.
2. Future Meme Device
A drawing machine is creating images on top of a table. The visitors are welcome to place empty black paper sheets in front of the machine. They can request a short, haiku-like prophecy by pressing a button on the table. These wisdoms are based on different artificial natural language processing (NLP) methods. The texts are generated by code, using stochastic and probabilistic methods. The corpus of the generated result relies on some of the authors of magic realism (Jorge Louis Borges, Italo Calvino and others).
3. Sonic Web
Part of the wall is painted in black. There are ropes applied to the surface using screws. An animation is projected on the structure, aligned and mapped precisely onto the ropes. The movements consist of small white elements and the kinetic combination of their algorithmic rhythms. If an element travelling on a rope crosses another rope, it triggers a sound belonging to that rope. Thus, the installation represents an abstract, string based musical instrument.
4. Random Forest
Several hanging paper stripes are forming a forest all together in the space. Some stones are fixing their position on the ground. The lines above the stones resemble different algorithmic taxonomies for each stripe. These lines are visible from both sides of the papers, so the drawings are transformed into a spatial installation where the audience is welcome to walk around. There is also a sonic component of the installation: an acoustic layer can be heard now and then while spending your time with the installation. These sounds are combinations of digital synthesis, percussive elements and pitch shifted insect noises.
