"Techno Ecologies" Participants

ABSTRACT
In 2012 artist group wechselstrom created a tool, which makes it possibile to control electronic sounds within the dispositive of preselected sequencer and/or synthesizer setups in a very fast, dizzy, sophisticated and sometimes chaotic way. The control medium, which builds the main factor in this equipment consists of water! The tool makes it possibile to control elecronic music in a directly way by grabbing into elecric current with both hands. The aim of this development was to make the change of the sound parameters available in form of a physically experience; to give the player a resistor / a weight into his hand, which makes it possible, to react in a more immediate and body conscious way to changes in sound – more possible, than classic controllers and interfaces like buttons, faders, rotary potentiometers, touch screens can do. The first approach was, to use Fluid Control as a matrix mixer that combines the functions of a switch, a fader, a panning regulator and a joystick in one hand. The setting that “wechselstrom” realized in summer 2012 (during the festival sound barrier 2012) consisted of two Fluid Control boxes, two CD players, which resulted a total of four mono tracks and a 4-channel sound system. The four mono tracks coming have been launched into the input side of the first box, there are mixed together with the use of water in their proportions and sound levels on two tracks. This mixture was fed into the second fluid control box and distributed dynamically to the four channels of the sound system. In a second setting we showed on Sept 15th 2012 in Düsseldorf, we used the possibilities of Fluid Control for influencing the control current that was produced by an analog sequncer and to drive an analog synthesizer.