liquid space 03
deSIGNing feedback loop systems

artistic workshop:
10.05 - 15.05.2005
at:
De Brakke Grond
in the context of: the Victorian Circus festival

workshop organised by: LAb[au]
participants: Peter Luinin, Elout de Kok, Geert-Jan Mulder, Mâa Bettier, Doug Lee.

workshop program:
04.05 - 14.05.05: liquid space 03 - workshop
10.05 -`20.00h: liquid space 01 02 exhibition opening presentation
11.05 - 14.05 _ 10.00 - 24.00h: exhibition
14.05 - 20.00h: liquid-space03 closing event, performance

about the workshop theme:

Liquid Space is a series of artistic workshops LAb[au] is setting up with different cultural institutions to design spatial audiovisuals with a specific focus on collaborative and shared processes resulting in installations, exhibitions and performances. Here, the space navigable music platform--a 3D engine developed by LAb[au]--is proposed as the starting-point for development and exchange to the invited artists. The engine is based on the principle of integrating different media in a structural, programmed manner, inside and through electronic space navigation. An environment where the performer navigates his created 3D space to compose music in real time, displayed in a 360degree projection space and a quadra-phonic sound system.

Def: In cybernetics and control theory, feedback is a process whereby some proportion or in general, function, of the output signal of a system is passed (fed back) to the input. Often this is done intentionally, in order to control the dynamic behaviour of the system.

After the liquid-space01 - Signforms and liquid-space02 - Numbers workshops, Labau proposes to explore further the machine space - the system - through one of its most revealing tidbits/processes, namely the feedback loop. In many ways, feedback exposes the system's internals, and unfold its parameters through its dynamic self contained and evolutive processes and in the case of open-systems linking these processes to direct human interaction "inside the loop".

deSIGNing feedback loop systems
By its very nature, feedback isn't related particularly to any specific medium, visual, sonic, robotic and even social/behavioural experiences comes easily to each one's mind. Historically the notion of feedback is a step stone in system's design, Norbert Wiener's writings acknowledge for this, giving birth to system's theory and more specifically to the notion of interactivity.

Whereas Signforms and Numbers themes could have been interpreted in a very metaphoric sense, feedback relates purely and simply to the system in itself, focusing on what is one of the founding intention of space navigable music, the creation of spatial audiovisual music specific to digital media, through parameter design and the common vector of "space", part of a broader scope of processes linked in a transdiciplinary and collaborative methodology/approach that labau is defining as metadesign.

Ranging from the conception and realisation of "audiovisual performative instruments" to "digital reactive space", creations made with space navigable music platform display what labau is considering as important values, like coherency with the media, highly conceptual content, methodology and integration into contemporary "digital culture".


exhibition:
in parallel to the workshop an exhibition about liquid-space01and liquid-space02 is organised
to see the exhibition