16 steps? 32? Phfft. How about 240 steps, with 240 sliders, over a space of 5 meters? That’s the latest vtol installation – and it’s breathtaking.
Don’t even think of trying this at home, kids. It looks like a nightmare build – that’s just 240 sliders alone. But in action, you can watch dazzling parades of red LED lights as they make their way across its expanse. The project is called “Ivy,” and it’s the creation of Moscow’s Dmitry Morozov, aka vtol (an artist moniker named after the vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft).
That’s impossibly costly and impractical, so this flies way past the more luxurious step sequencers we’ve seen of late (like Polyend’s seq or Koma’s Komplex. Behold its glitchy, bleepy dance:
While the scale is overwhelming, there’s one really clever sequencer idea that you could copy. While there’s just one big array of sliders, Ivy has multiple voices – hence you see more than one light blinking its way across the array. And those voices can be independent, added and removed at will and each with assignable tempo.
There’s some philosophical background to this, too. The installation interprets the “Open Codes” theme of a new exhibition at ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Arts and Media technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany:
On one side, Ivy is a representation of an archaic method of electronic music programming for analog synthesizers. On the other side – gigantic scale and obsessive multiplication of simple primitive elements turns this project into an art installation, that is referring to the topic of graphic and physical organization of parameters in electronic music.
Specs:
Commission by ZKM for Open Codes exhibition, Karlsruhe, 2017.
hardware:
– arduino mega with 74hc4067 multiplexors
– teensy for led control
– ws2811 leds
– 10k sliders x240soft:
– max/msp
More:
http://vtol.cc/filter/works/ivy