A Sound Vehicle Swarm (with Sam Scranton)

A Sound Vehicle Swarm is a robotic art installation that was commissioned by the Festival Zero 1 (2022) in La Rochelle, France, and presented in the Centre de Choregraphie National (CCN). It was developed in collaboration with sound artist Sam Scranton, and with the help of production assistant Roiel Benitez Bertoni.

Artistic Statement:

A Sound Vehicle Swarm” is an immersive installation made of multiple cybernetic automata that activate space through sound and movement. Each robot embodies cognition through the ability to move, sense, and emit acoustic waves. Together with the room they evolve in, they form an ecosystem of resonances, reflections and information. The installation is a reference to the long lineage of automata that extends back to the late medieval period, when craftspeople, artists, and scientists were building mimicking machines to replicate birds, humans, and planets. These early mechanical organisms were made in an attempt to not only replicate the world, but to gain intimate knowledge of the agency inherent to all things. A reductionist dream eroded by the more recent discovery of chaos and complexity, and its impact in climate change, collective dynamics and more. “A Sound Vehicle Swarm” depicts this collision of paradigms in a setting where engineered machines become autonomous and unpredictable when augmented with animal communication and perception capabilities. Audience members participate in the synthetic psychology of a robotic ecosystem, disturbing a precarious equilibrium by moving around sources, modulating acoustic wave propagation, and pushing the swarm to self-organize new soundscapes. When moving through “A Sound Vehicles Swarm”, one experiences an artificial nature, reminiscent of patterns encountered in the real world, however dislocated and placed in a novel, uncanny context.