Complex site-specific installation — Femke Herregraven's solo show at Radius, Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology in Delft
A speculative future of Radius is generated by a simulation that is driven by 30+ sensors scanning the building and its environment during the months of the exhibition. The digital twin of the former water reservoir that houses Radius is installed as a 1:1 scale projection within the space. The aural environment is filled with the vocalisations of an AI voice model which is retrained continuously to express the environmental changes that the sensors track. Actors and their milieu express their complex relationships and interdependencies.
I developed the technical concept in conversation with the artist and led the architecture of the system with the involvement of the Radius technical and production team. We worked with a sound artist, a small 3D and UE5 team who built the Unreal level and its internal logic and an install team who took care of the projection mapping (2 screens and 6 projectors), Arduino code and the physical installation.
The rest of the build was my responsibility. This included:
- machine learning system that trained the audio model and generated the voice samples
- Ableton project that modulated the training data according to the incoming sensor data feeds
- Max for Live instrument for the dynamic live playback of the generated voice samples
- Ableton project that run the multi-channel audio installation
- complete system of automation, orchestration, message trafficking, asset handling
- C++ patch of the NDI Unreal plugin to make it work in our setup of parallel streams
- PyTorch
- Unreal Engine
- 20+ channel audio
- environmental sensors
- Arduino
- Ableton Live
- Max for Live
- QLab
- DMX
- Dante
- NDI
- OSC
- Docker
- RabbitMQ
- Projection Mapping
- TouchDesigner