Measurements are Artificial Perception
The winning project in the category sound for the ONB Labs challenge 2019 was contributed by Marcus Bitzl. We thank all participants and congratulate our winner!
Here's a short description of the project:
This work uses historical conversation tables for measurement units to play with different levels of perception and interpretation: The visual structure is deconstructed and acoustically recreated. The hierarchical perception in rows, words and finally characters and numbers becomes rhythm and melody, played by a Glockenspiel as artificial as the world created using those measurement systems itself.
A choir of artificial intelligences is used to explore the interpretation of information by humans and machines: The tables were once planned, written, typesetted and printed. Later, scanned and processed by optical character recognition. For this work that textual representation was first interpreted by a human, and then again by the chanting machines.
This is Marcus Bitzl's answer to the ONB Labs Challenge question 'How does a conversion table for new and old measurements from the 19th century sound as a Noise or Postpunk composition?':
This is said conversion table:
