Stan Wijnans

MuDanx

6A Robo - sound performances and the human-machine relationship

                   
                          CYSP1

‘CYSP1’ (above) is a performance of a kinetic sculpture built with color sensors and electronic analogue components. It was choreographed by Maurice Bejart, onthe music of Pierre Henry. This pioneering interactive work generated different kind of movements in response to the presence of observers. Schoeffer’s work provided a bridge between kinetics and robotics. A press release from 1956 about this performance tells us that the sculpture apparently turned around itself “transmitting a screeching sound with a dislocated turn that becomes foolish when it accelerates its behaviour, the light it spreads resembles the search lights  at the entrance of a prison hall, used by the police to hunt the men escaping the prison. There is no exhibition hall, no crowd, nothing less than an ecstatic space of sounds, colors and light.” (online reference translated from french translated by Stan Wijnans). 40 years later robotics performer Chico MacMurtrie from Amorphic Robot Works also talks about the ‘screeching’ robot:

The performance begins with a screech. A spot light reveals the source: a small machine whose sole purpose in life, it seems, is to create this noise. Soon other machines begin to come alive. Pistons fire. Metal clangs. Someone in the audience screams as a raw metal Dog Monkey (appropriately named because it, well, resembles a cross between a dog and a monkey) claws its way toward her in the dark. Soon the room is alive with machines struggling to live, struggling to move, struggling to stand...  One climbs down a rope from the ceiling. Another, trapped inside a huge inflated bag, shakes and wiggles in...is that pain?
(MacMurtrie & Spingarn-Koff 1997)

As we can read above and we could learn from ‘The Anatomical Exoskeleton‘ project, robotic engineers and artists are inclined towards a sound concept of primal mechanical sounds, either produced by the machine’s construction or by added electronic sounds. Most engineers seem to strive for futuristic humans or ‘mechanical living’ creatures that spit out these sort of artificial non-musical sounds that relate directly to the machine and the robotic, machine movements.
                  
                    
                    ‘Skeletal Reflection’(Amorphic Robot Works)