Schwärmen + Vernetzen by Hanns Holger Rutz

"Schwärmen + Vernetzen" (swarming and networking) explores the possibilities of transdisciplinary work in art, realising them through forms of "movement profiles", retracing the vacating of individual viewpoints of the participating artists and the emergence of joint forms of movement. The project is a collaboration between writer Gertrude Grossegger, installation arts and trained molecular biologist Nayarí Castillo, and sound artist Hanns Holger Rutz. In order to make novel connections between text, visual elements and sounds possible, the three artists put themselves into an experimental arrangement, topically structured around dynamical systems of swarming and networking, originating from biology; we are interested in systems in which new organisms develop without dissolving their partial structures, individual media, and individual scopes of work. Stages of the project are a series of encounters of the artists, the outcome of each of which is a further development of materials, an intensive retreat over several days, a publication in a literature journal, an exhibition at Akademie Graz, a symposium, and a printed catalog.

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proposed wiring diagram for the sound system. we use 18 physical amplifier channels, mapped via relays to 108 small speakers.
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The idea is to build a "particle system" or "swarm" with the sound generating system itself, connecting nine Raspberry Pi computers in a network, each contributing with two physical channels and twelve logical channels to the overall sound network.
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Audio Network

30-Jul-2017 - here's a photo from installing the "animal" in situ; we found a great metal frame on top of which the system is installed; it will then be covered by a glass dome. I used a ternary system for the cable numbering, giving an interesting visual pattern of white, black, green, yellow. 04-aug-2017 all channels are setup and working.

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The relay boards have arrived in the meantime. Fingers crossed that all circuits are functional and the design works out as planned…
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prototyping the relay mapping (one input channel and four output channels)
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Found these little beauties at the local electronics store. The left one has a diameter of just 45mm and without further measures has a weaker bass response compared to the right one (68mm). However it has a much cleaner and flatter response, whereas the larger diaphragm sounds quite nasal. There is a reason, the right one costs under 1 EUR compared to 5 EUR for the left speaker.
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23-Jul-2017; almost all parts are here, including threaded standoffs to stack the relay boards and the Pis. Test set-up with one side of a board, i.e. 1 to 6 channels; working fine (see video).
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Once you add a boundary layer to the small speaker, the acoustic bass response becomes quite good. What are we going to do? I think there will be 25cm impermeable discs around them…?

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---
meta: true
author: HHR
project: SchwaermenVernetzen
keywords: [dynamical systems, swarming, networking, biology, systems, organisms, text, visual, elements, sound, interdisciplinary, particle system, generative system, raspberry, multichannel, network]
---

"Charlieplexing is a technique for driving a ∞ in which relatively few I/O pins on a ∞ are used to drive an array of ∞."

{kind: note, keywords: [multiplexing, charlieplexing, pins, raspberry]}

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