Over the last months Telcosystems has been working at BALTAN on a new installation called 12_Series. On April 24, 2009 the world premiere of 12_Series will be held at Woodstreet Galleries in Pittsburgh, USA. 12_Series is a generative multichannel computer installation by Telcosystems that has been developed under the umbrella of BALTAN’s Poème Numérique research programme. Together with Martijn van Boven, Telcosystems also curated the Machine Improvisations exhibition, running next to 12_Series at Woodstreet Galleries until June 20, 2009.
The installation is part of the Poème Numérique research programme and Telcosystems uses the installation to investigate forms of audiovisual architecture, immersive environments, spatial qualities of multichannel audiovisual content and evolutionary principles for composition. The generative nature of 12_Series also leaves space for gameplay, machine improvisations and the unexpected….
We programmed everything for 12_Series in the graphical programming environment Max5. We developed some custom max objects in order to tackle some fundamental problems we ran into.
1. We developed a new external for max5 called ‘Multi-Break’ to enable synchronized dsp driven movement of envelopes between multiple machines and also to get it distributed and updated efficiently over a network.
2. The 74.adc was developed by Timothy Place for us because it turned out the standard adc object from cycling74 at this time is unable to handle digital audio from the default optical input of the apple computers correctly. Somehow the adc looses sync after an x amount of time and starts to create all kinds of glitches and noise in the audio chain. The 74.adc object bypasses coreaudio altogether, since it is build on port audio, a library developed for the PD programming environment.
The choice for macmini’s has several advantages, they are widely available, relatively cheap and compact and last but not least run OSX Leopard.
But the choice for this hardware also ment we had to programme very efficiently since the macmini’s have no dedicated GPU, they are equipped with the 9400m integrated graphics chip from nvidia, so the sound and image generators share for a big part the CPU, which usually leads to loads of problems when demanding too much of it.
So, a lot of work has been put into maximizing the performance efficiency of the software. This means a lot cannot be done, but it also means we developed some very efficient techniques to get a wide range of aesthetic results
In order to keep communication as simple as possible and to offload work as much as possible from the macmini’s we decided to run all the compositional algorithms on a 13th macmini machine, the server. In this way the 12 macmini’s could function solely as audiovisual generators and only receive the final results made in the server, not spending cycle’s on all the evolutionary decisions and what not.
The installation runs on 13 macmini’s; 1 server and 12 clients. A general sync is provided via optical audio from the server to the macmini’s, through a chain of inday tld-1 optical audio splitter boxes. The communication to and from the server is provided via a gigabit network. The L(eft) analogue sound output of each macmini is sent to a speaker, the R(ight) analogue sound output of each macmini is sent to an audiomixer, and from there to two sub speakers. The miniDVI port is used to send the images to a 24 inch screen. The macmini’s are automagically powered on and off every day by dssw’s PowerManager, the max5 standalones are crash ‘protected’ by a custom launchd file created with Lingon.
The first version is spatially configured as an audiovisual horizon, spanning some 12 meters. This allows the audience to experience all twelve machines at the same time but also gives the opportunity to ‘zoom in’ and focus on just a few or even one. For future versions we also envision panoramic configurations like 180 and 360 degrees, so the experience is all around the audience, but also a a circular version facing outwards, in order to let the audience move around the installation. Depending on the location of the exhibitions the size of the screens should be bigger, or even use projections.
We also envision a new live performance using the installation as an instrument we can operate in real time with all Telcosystems members.
