Recursive Care
2018-ongoing | industrial feedback robot
RECURSIVE CARE is a series of pieces for an industrial robotic arm controlling audio feedback with a microphone and surrounding monitors.
An industrial robotic arm surrounded by a monitor dome is operating a highly directional microphone, creating dynamic feedback in a weightless choreography. The robot’s accuracy in timing and positioning allows for detailed control of the feedback behavior and its transformations, as well as the possibility to recreate, relocate and modify these sonorities. In addition to the directional frontal capture, the microphone also occasionally amplifies the low frequencies coming from the robot’s motors, creating a second voice in counterpoint to the feedback line.
The site-specific pieces explores the sounds of acoustic feedback produced by the physical relationships between the microphone, the loudspeaker cones and the surrounding acoustic environment. The room becomes a giant resonator amplifying both acoustic activity and inactivity, and the sounds become a product of spatial relationships. The industrial robot controls the movement and position of the microphone, and its choreography allows a relative control of the behaviour and transformations of the acoustic feedback, and thus the possibility to recreate sounds, gestures and tones.
RECURSIVE CARE (2022, performance:20’/ installation:∞) was premiered in the old oil cistern of Nonagon Festival (2022) with 8 equal-sized monitors in a wide circle (12m D) behind the audience. (At Nonagon) the work was combined with live-video visuals by Annie Tådne. The visuals explore the very same recursive phenomena but by visual means. A camera is pointed toward its own output, which creates optical feedback. The robot’s movements together with the light create organic recursive patterns in realtime.
REITERATION HUG (2022, performance / installation: ∞) was premiered in the mobile art institution Kulturvagnen in Småland. 1-2 visitors at a time inside the caravan evoked an intimate encounter with the feedback robot.
SPIEGELREIGEN (2021, performance: 3′) was premiered at the Swedish MPA Gala, Grand Hôtel (Stockholm) with 8 different-sized monitors in a close circle and at different heights.
HERE IN MY ARMS and ‘TOL LINGER (2018, performance: 25-30’,installation: ∞), commissioned by Audiorama (SE) and sponsored by the Swedish Arts Council and Universal Robots was premiered and exhibited for three weeks at Audiorama, Skeppsholmen in a 24 monitor dome.
Selected performances: Audiorama (Stockholm), Nordic Music Days (Bodø), Geiger Oktoberfest (Atalante, Göteborg), Swedish MPA Gala (Grand Hôtel, Stockholm), Automated Organism (Fylkingen, Stockholm), Nonagon Festival (Svanö, Ådalen), Kulturvagnen (Berg, Småland)