Neural Labyrinths - a performance installation

Neural Labyrinths is inspired by the threads running through David Tudor’s live electronics works, in particular, the balance between the deceptive technical simplicity of the networks, and the subtle richness of their sounding behaviors. Much of the technical setup stems from Tudor’s working methods: neural synthesis, modular processing chains, tuned transducers, and people who “could only hope to inOluence ...” the resulting system.

While Tudor and Gordon Mumma did not seem to refer to second order cybernetics explicitly, the ideas of adaptive systems, meta-systems subsuming systems and their observers, and circular causality, seem perfectly suited to assembling complex setups that may equally be called composed instruments or networks, and that show the sense of aliveness that can come from letting the systems “reveal their personalities”.

Neural Labyrinths is a network of six nodes/stations, each of which consists of: An embedded computer running a feedback synthesis program; audio inputs to the neural network from an air microphone, vibration sensor, and audio lines from other nodes; processing by a modular FX program as complex feedback/resonator; acoustic output via loudspeaker, and vibration transducer via a chosen object; and 2 channels of audio output to connect to other nodes.

Each node/station is individualized by different choices of resonating objects, and transducers. The overall assemblage of nodes is cross-connected by all acoustic signals traveling through air to all listening microphones and transducers, a fixed topology of electronic audio connections (‘hardwired’), and their tunable connection strengths.

This network is both an installation and a multi-player performance environment, and new individualizations can optionally be created in workshop situations.