''Water Creatures'' Sonic enviroment to give life to artificial creatures in a garden Prater Biergarten Marc Marc, Berlin - 1996 August 15...31 Presented by Staalplaat & Gallery O-Zwei 'Son Ambiente Klang festival'

Existential abstraction New creatures moved into the garden, living in harmony with all others as being in their natural biosphere Acoustical appearance Imaginary creatures

Prosaic abstraction 16 Loudspeakers were hanged in a garden - most of them in the trees. By computer programmed algorithms noise sounds were moved over the loudspeakers system. Five pieces were programmed, each consisting out of multiple moves with dynamic noise colouring. The speed of the moving noise, the colour and absolute volume dynamics were tuned to interact with both the acoustic characteristics of the garden and the perception of the visitors. All together forming a psycho- acoustic installation, manifesting a sweet fairy-tail like concept

The illustration above shows a worksheet to give live to 7 creatures and their terratory in the garden. All data is fed into the data base of the controlling software: moving character, dynamical change of noise colour and absolute volume. All creatures move simultanous with their own characteristics. The moving is done by controlling 32 so called Voltage Controlled Amplifiers (VCA's) that are fed with Noise sounds which are filtered by 8 Voltage Controlled Filters (VCF's) which use White Noise as a base input signal. All these units are analog but, are controlled by the computer via Digital to Analog control Voltage converters.

The audience hardly notice that there are 16 loudspeakers wired up and that something new has moved into the garden. At a certain moment it appears that something is there but, what it exactly is remains a mistery.

Even more hidden are the techniques behind it. All loudspeakers are wired to the control room. There the amplifiers, interfaces and computer make sure that the creatures are moving around in the garden for 24 hours a day.

Credits For this projects I own special thanks to: Wolfgang Krause from Gallery O-Zwei and GeertJan Hobijn from Staalplaat as being the organisators. Erik Hobijn, Tecla Akker and SilkeScreen for their general support. Philipp Thuerwaechter for his Java programming. Ulf Schleth from Thing.de for his server support. Eric Verwaal - Dutch Cultural Attache for Germany : transport support, donation of a computer and for being there. Digitale Stadt Berlin : for the use of a 'windows 95 computer'. WWW Control Originally the installation was also meant to be controlled by WWW access. Lots of work was done to have this working (in particular by Philipp Thuerwaechter). Then - about to be ready to take off with it - I decided that the creatures could not bear the World Wide Web access (they would die) and thus cancelled the Internet part of the concept (sorry guys).

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