"My Marvellous Impression Management Impotence" is an interactive, agent-based sound installation with 24 speakers and 8 microphones and was realized as a part of my Bachelor´s thesis at the University of the Arts, Bremen, supervised by Prof. Lischka and Prof. Schwoon.

Hanging from the ceiling, the speakers and microphones are organised in a grid forming a hexagon. Whenever the measured audio signals in a given microphone reach a certain threshold, a two-second soundfile is recorded. Thereby, in the speaker which is nearest to the recording microphone a "sound agent" is created, i. e. the soundfile is given certain attributes that define how and where the sound is played from now on. You could speak of the behaviour of the sound agent that will now move and change autonomously within the speakers´ grid, following certain rules. Metaphorically, the speakers´ grid could be seen as an ecosystem for the emerging sound agents those are "living" and interacting within the grid.

With the creation of the sound agent, it is randomly assigned its life expectancy (ranging from 17 to 70 seconds). During this time the sound is played in a loop starting off from the speaker which is nearest to the recording microphone. Now the sound agent chooses a direction within the grid (N, NE, SE, S, SW, or NW) and moves to the adjacent speaker in that direction, i.e. the sound agent migrates to different speakers over the time.
While the agent is ageing, the playback becomes slightly slower and after a while some parts of the soundfile are randomly being deleted, giving it a somewhat staccato appearance. Thus, the changing playback speed and the deletion of certain parts of the sound lets us experience the ageing processes of the soundfiles. Shortly before an agent "dies", the amplitude of the soundfile is raised and it takes its roaring leave of the system.

Whenever two sound agents meet at the same speaker, they both die and a new agent is created with properties and parts of the two originating soundfiles. Metaphorically speaking again, you could say, two parent sound agents are having a baby but unfortunatly burn out completly in the act and die. The child gets its own new life expectancy and can now create (when meeting an other agent) a child by itself, too.

The emerging sound aesthetics are quite idiosyncratic and it is absolutely clear that the sounds, originally all coming from recorded auditory events in the exhibition room, are computationally processed. Initially, you get the correlation between the original live event and the shortly after starting playback of the soundfile. But then, the system acts rather intractable. The sounds are becoming alienated and visitors have no control whatsoever about how the agents behave and change and how they relate to other agents.
The title refers to this loss of control of alienated words, fragments, sounds. In various contexts people try to manage their "impression management", i. e. the process through which people try to control the impressions other people form of them. But this is not an easy task, if you follow the radical constructionists, since different people see the world (– better: construct their world) differently and thereby interpret alienations differently.
The word "marvellous" in the title, however, indicates, that such a perception must not necessarily be a bad thing. A good deal more, if you´d adopt this perception, you might conclude, that you need not to care too much about your impression management, after all, and gain some more serenity and freedom by accepting your own shiftlessness.

2007
interactive, agent-based sound installation
24 speakers, 8 microphones, Max/MSP Software, JavaScript

watch a 2 min. video documentation
(requires the Flash player)

read the documentation (which is in German, however)