ANH-01

ANH-01 extends the experiment in artificial acoustic ecosystems begun with ANH-00, opening it to more complex forms of evolving vocalisation and the longer duration of an outdoor environment. The work was created for Jack into the Noösphere, one of three programmes that constituted the inaugural Chiba City Festival of Arts. Installed in a Japanese garden, five transparent units listen to their surroundings through microphones and release their own voices back into the environment.

The digital agents evolve using NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies), a method that evolves the structure and connections of neural networks. Rather than selecting from precomposed melodies, the agents acquire their own modes of vocalisation, including pitch, through evolution. Sounds emitted by each unit reach the others through their microphones, influencing the evolution of the agents inhabiting them. As environmental sounds and the voices of multiple populations overlap, their vocalisations continue to change in real time throughout the exhibition, forming acoustic relationships that no human has composed.

The hardware was modified to operate outdoors for extended periods, placing the digital agents within the continually changing acoustic conditions of an existing environment. Here, technology does not simply stand outside nature as an instrument of observation and measurement. It becomes a participant in acoustic space, changing as it is affected by its surroundings. ANH-01 asks when a sound produced by a machine becomes a ‘voice’, and when the relationships emerging between devices and their environment might become an ‘ecosystem’.