Martin Harris Centre
FOYER interactive works

Code Chain (2017)
Ludger Brümmer & Elizabeth Pich (ZKM, Karlsruhe)
Interactive sound installation, app, tablet PC
Devices connected to each other enable chain processes involving several players. In “CodeChain”, sounds are generated according to the principle of the popular children’s game “whisper down the lane” or “telephone”, which are sent to other players and processed by them. Thus the players alter a sound step-by-step, and may change it until it bears no resemblance to the initial sound.
The chain begins with rushing sounds, various oscillators, frequency modulators, and own or prepared recordings, which users select via double click. The selected sound is sent to one of the devices in the pool, where a fellow player can add effects. Available effects are echoes and reverberations, delay, treble and bass filters, granular synthesis, and distortion. In addition the sounds can be formed into a melody with a sequencer. After the sound has had as many effects as desired added to it, it is sent to the next player. Each player changes the sound one more time. The sounds resulting from this process are therefore the result of a collective, partially random, partially deliberate process.

Monocause. Dialectics of the Post-Truth Era (2017)
Yannick Hofmann (ZKM, Karlsruhe)
Interactive sound installation, iOS app
It seems as though in the post-truth age processes of public opinion formation are following more and more the exclusive disjunction of mathematical logic (“either … or …”). Whether in the context of the US presidential election campaign of 2016, so-called Brexit, or the Hamburg G20 protests, post-truthism and false dilemmas polarize society and suggest that only extremes exist that are opposed to each other (for example like/dislike, black/white, rich/poor). For “Monocause. Dialectics of the Post-Truth Era”, excerpts from various texts and speeches were collected – including, for example, the doctrine of US President Bush in the 2000s (“you’re either with us, or against us”). With a swipe, museum visitors can express sympathy with or resentment towards people from A like Adorno to Z like Žižek. The swipe gesture thus becomes the equivalent of the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” hand gestures of Roman emperors at the circus. The interface is based conceptually and in its design on the famous dating app Tinder.

Room F20 – video projections

Sculpture (2017)
Ludger Brümmer (ZKM)
Audiovisual Installation
Cybernetic objects are self-regulating or recursively acting systems that seem to act independently. In the Sculpture installation, the computer initially generates manually generated sounds, which are measured by a microphone in their volume and trigger new sounds at the appropriate volume. This system acts completely self-sufficiently and creates different sound patterns as well as visual objects in the form of short video passages. During the performance, the composer does not interfere with the way it works, but merely changes the sounds or video scenes used.

Quantum Music #002 (2018)
Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos, Daniel Burgarth
Music and Quantum Dynamics share a wave-like nature. Many analogies and surprising connections between the two fields exists, which can be illustrated and explored through sonification techniques. Quantum Music #002 is is an audiovisual installation based on controlled quantum dynamical systems.The artists / scientists of the composition have suggested in a research paper in the past an intuitive sonification process in order to represent acoustically and musically an important quantum phenomenon that is used in quantum computation. Quantum Music #002 employees these techniques and communicates the inherent beauty of the magic world of quantum mechanics by combining musical and visual content in a pure minimalistic language.