Breathing new life back into obsolete and forgotten technology in media arts projects has seen a surge of increased activity in recent years. A kind of technological remix culture combined with a DIY hacking mentality has facilitated the resurrection of analogue mechanisms from the dead for use in novel ways – ironically the very mechanisms that were displaced by their digital successors. D.O.R.T.H.E. by Lasse Munk by Søren Andreasen, combines and old typewriter with scrap electronic components allowing typed phrases to be remapped into electro-acoustic music. A Max/MSP patch forms the communication bridge between the typewriter and a variety of sound emitting devices, controlled by motors, such as radios and parts of clocks. Data collected from words and sentences is analysed and then translated into a mechanical stream of tone fragments, cut-up radio speech, glitches, analogue click and beeps. A variety remapping strategies are employed in D.O.R.T.H.E – for example translating the number of letters in a word to a single pitch or more advanced techniques such as analysing phonetics or searching sentences for words attributing emotional states such as “joy, distress, happiness, discomfort and fear”. The patterns of sound and slices of speech give the sonic impression of concatenated scrap formulating thoughts by itself – a generative autopoetic process as the mechanism adjusts pitch and tone to give the impression emotional nuances while in “cognition”. Paul Prudence

 

D.O.R.T.H.E. from Lasse Munk