Press materials can be downloaded on this link.
Saturn3 meets Empathy Swarm: Five sound robots, spinning beams of focussed sound around multiple axes, telling a story about the relationship between man and machine. The sound is generated through electromagnetic feedback, the movements are controlled remotely - until the robots take over, modify the sound, synthesize their own form of communication, perceive the human, recognize emotions and react to the facial expressions of one man. As kick-off of Katrin Hochschuh and Adam Donovan‘s EMAP Residency at KONTEJNER this summer, they spend 3 weeks working on Emotion Recognition, Psychophysics Machines, and Sound Generation at the Cultural Department of the Student Centre Zagreb, Music Showroom. Łukasz Szałankiewicz aka Zenial joins them to perform at the Showroom of Contemporary Sound Festival. He will be the first one to use the emotion system prototype live on stage as part of their collaborative Saturn3 setup which is inspired by the topics of the 1980’s science fiction movie Saturn 3. The atmosphere and the human-robotic interaction is reflected in the collaborative performance under the same name.
Katrin Hochschuh (DE)
Hochschuh has an architectural background in digital and robotic fabrication, exploring architectural geometries, algorithms, swarm simulation and interactivity. She has worked together with François Roche in his experimental practice New-Territories at the intersection of speculative architecture, experimental short movie production, and art. In that scope, the Timidity Symptom was exhibited at the Architecture Biennale Venice 2014 and she was also part of the production of a collaborative piece With with Carsten Höller, exhibited at Air de Paris, France (2013) and at Donaufestival, Krems, Austria (2013). Together with the ETH Zurich’s MAS she exhibited a prototype of a robotically fabricated pavilion at the Design Biennale Zurich and for the Museum of Digital Art, Zurich she developed a digital embroidery project.
contact: katrin@hochschuh-donovan.com
Adam Donovan (AU/DE)
Donovan's artistic work relates to a specific field of acoustics and robotics merged with visual arts since 1996. He exhibited and presented his work all around the globe, in renowned exhibition spaces and festivals such as ISEA Dubai, WRO festival in Poland, NEXT festival in Slovakia and Museum of digital art in Zürich. As a duo Adam Donovan and Katrin Hochschuh exhibited Curious Tautophone – Tensor field Ontology as part of Experimenta Make Sense in Australia and have performed at major European Sound art festivals in Poland and Slovenia. Currently, as part of EMARE they work on Empathy Swarm which explores non-anthropomorphic swarm robot behaviour using emotion recognition reinforcement. Together they create sophisticated robotic mechanisms that play with the unobtrusive uncanny systems within us. Their works and machines invoke an otherness or timelessness that is only present in the here and now.
contact: adam@hochschuh-donovan.com
Łukasz Szałankiewicz (PL)
Łukasz Szałankiewicz (alias ZENIAL) is an electronic music performer and sound artist. Lukasz is a member of the Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music (PSeME) and the Polish Society for Contemporary Music (the Polish subsection of the ISCM). His formative artistic years began in the early 90s with an immersion in the demo scene — an early computer community based around transcending hardware limitations. The multimedia nature of demo scene has remained an important element of his solo artistic work, where the sound is often combined with visuals and influenced by a conceptual framework.
