Sonic Current

Sonic current is a site-specific sound installation which transform architectural locations into “sonic conscious” agents. The transformation of the site into a body, with its sense organs (microphones) and actuators (loudspeakers), enable the site to articulate and manifest itself in an open dialogue with its visitors. Sounds from visitors, environment or other exhibited installations, captured as external stimuli by the microphonic “ears”, are distributed over a digital, audio rate artificial neural network. Inside the high-dimensionally dynamic, self-regulating network, sound circulates recursively in multiple recurrent layers, resulting to diversely fragile resonant frequencies, an equivalent of a wide spectrum of flickering colors. The network output is assigned to the loudspeakers, which radiate the neuronaly processed resonances back to the site. The visitors can identify basic similarities of their body with the installation (stimulus response, dynamic memory) and can interact by various ways. Aside the obvious insertion of unintended or deliberated sounds into the network, a passive presence or a movement of a human body in the site, will affect the filtering characteristics of the site and will drive the network dynamics to seek for a new delicate equilibrium. Sound, as information, electric current or organic fluids, is the precious vital substance that sustains “artificial sonic life” on the site.

Giannoutakis Kosmas