Contingency and Synchronization
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Contingency and Synchronization
Sound Installaion
Luc Döbereiner, David Pirrò
Orpheus Intituut, Ghent, March 21–22, 2019 Link
The installation was presented for the first time the seminar entitled Simulation and Computer Experimentation in Music and Sound Art, co-organised by the Orpheus Institute, Ghent (BE) and ALMAT.
It is based on a mathematical model used to describe synchronization, the Kuramoto model. Each loudspeaker outputs an oscillator which tries to link to another periodic input (picked up by a microphone). The installation consists of six loudspeaker-microphone couples that, in their endless process of synchronization, leave traces of sound forms over time
Contingency and Synchronization: Conceptual Framework, Artistic Experiments and Speculative Syn-theses
Journal Article
David Pirrò, Luc Döbereiner
In Journal Music\/Technology Issue XVII, 2023.
One of the strongest motivations for working with algorithms in any artistic practice is the desire to be surprised, to initiate processes that can give rise to something that can develop, react, and transform in an indeterminate, open, and at least partially autonomous way. Self-organizing systems, machine learning, and stochastic processes may serve as examples of distinct branches of generative procedures that artists explore in order to achieve unexpected aesthetic results, inexhaustible variation, and non-teleological development. At the same time, these concepts and technologies are also used, in the arts and beyond, due to their potential to make behaviors and developments more predictable, stable, calculable, and controllable. Hence, there is an inherent tension between openness and predictability. This paper discusses the practice-based research project Contingency and Synchronization, which revolves around this tension and which deals with the question of how algorithms can produce something new and unpredictable, in other words, with the contingency of computational processes. At first glance, contingency and synchronization seem to be diametrically opposed notions, one pointing towards surprising indeterminacy and the other to the deterministic leveling out of differences. However, this project practically works through how one can be expressed through the other.
Contingency and Synchronization - Online
Online Publication
David Pirrò, Luc Döbereiner
Online Publication, Research Catalogue, 2021.
Introduction
Contingency and Synchronization is a series of artistic research works by Luc Döbereiner and David Pirrò, exploring the relation between deterministic synchronization algorithms and contingency. Each iteration in this series renegotiates this relation and attempts to connect computation, site and listening in ways specific to the material format (live performance, spatial installation, web-based installation, visualization, closed-off rendering).
We are interested in the emergence of sonic forms from the interaction of deterministic algorithms and the contingency of their material performance, which includes their connection to spaces, performers, listeners and machines. We use algorithms that have a strong internal telos in order to let the generative power of disturbances and deviations unfold.
The tools and setups we develop render internal and external contingency perceptible in certain intended ways, which can be said to limit the radical otherness of contingency. At the same time, it is only through this form of aesthetic transposition or translation that we can explore and expose the contigency of our material. The encounter of these two opposed tendencies creates singularities that constitute the works of this series.
This collaboration started during Luc's residency in the context of the ALMAT project, but has since developed further. The works we collect here take multiple forms. e,g textual, auditory, visual etc. and employ multiple perspectives: conceptual, reflective, scientific, technological, phenomenological, aesthetic etc. Each of these layers has its own autonomy but affects the other layers. These artefacts should help to trace the process we have followed.