Tuomas Laitinen‘s “Swarm Chorus” installation and performance at the OODI library by ALA Architects, Helsinki, Finland, on January 11th-March 10th, 2019.
Part of Finnish Cultural Institute in New York‘s Mobius fellowship program project “The Library’s Other Intelligences“, supported by KONE Foundation.
ROLE: Technology consulting, creation and generation of hybrid new language based on quantum physics, religious and utopian writings with a novel WWW browser based local tool, using Markov chain algorithms.
Tuomas Laitinen presents Swarm Chorus. Laitinen has composed a performative installation and a sound piece with generative tools that are interpreting the construction of medieval musical canons. He experiments with the form of the canon, a kind of an algorithm that allows us to generate complex polyphony from seemingly simple collections of organised sound. Here, the canon form can be seen as a morphing and churning organism, a layered progression without a definitive beginning or end. The work as a whole is likened to an ecosystem of circulating substances, with its words, inspired by ecological science fiction, functioning as fictional recipe poems describing and decoding an alchemistic combination of matter and meaning.
In Swarm Chorus, one can find ancient epistemic modalities layered with the notion of extended embodied mind as a conductor for accumulated knowledge. In the library space, this information is translated into sound. These aural events are channeled in the location with the aid of singers and a sound installation for ultrasonic speaker, as an attempt to gently tend to and activate the space. Aside from the performance, a speculative score for the composition is displayed in the form of an installation consisting of a video—partly generated by an AI—and a series of hand-printed scrolls.
The Library’s Other Intelligences, an art project organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York through its in collaboration with the Helsinki Public Library is on view at the new Central Library Oodi until March 10, 2019. The project features newly commissioned artworks, original research and a series of events, including an opening celebration on Friday, January 11, and a symposium on Saturday, January 12.
MOBIUS fellows Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK) and Shannon Mattern (The New School, US) have commissioned Finnish artists Samir Bhowmik, Tuomas A. Laitinen, and Jenna Sutela to create works that examine the new intelligences represented in our evolving knowledge institutions. These artworks reveal the alien logics of neural nets, give voice to machinic and speculative languages, and make visible the material infrastructures that allow intelligence to circulate. The exhibition’s featured artists are known for work that engages with AI, biological intelligence, digital culture, and the infrastructures of modern societies.