Description
SPIRALPROJEKT
1983/2024
Web-based audio-visual real-time animation
Edition: 1/1/404
Minting open until 14 November 2024, 6 PM CET. From 29 October 2024, 6 PM CET.
By Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of SPIRALPROJEKT by visual artist Betha Sarasin in collaboration with musician Markus Ganz, 1983.
"Why should I try to do something that nature can do much better? The cube can stand on its own, stacked on top of its peers, joined in a row, as a square or tower, as a precisely formulated large or small sculpture. The simple basic form invites you to play."
– Betha Sarasin
Betha Sarasin (1930–2016) was a Swiss artist known for her strikingly diverse oeuvre. In addition to informal and concrete paintings and figurative and concrete drawings, her work also includes, from 1978, computer-aided pieces.
SPIRALPROJEKT is a generative multimedia project that dates back to 1983. Sarasin, together with musician Markus Ganz (*1961) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Freiburg, Germany, developed software in Fortran to create three-dimensional spirals. Until then, she had mainly made cuts on the cube; now she wanted to achieve an orderly spatial movement for the cube, to make it "fly," so to speak, and capture infinity.
These spirals are formed by algorithmically evolving sequences of cubes. However, the innovative character of SPIRALPROJEKT was only recognized much later as generative art. Since it was not possible to emulate the software on a PC in the mid-1980s, it fell into oblivion. In 2003, the software was emulated for Apple Macintosh. In 2024, it was ported to P5.js and enhanced.
From the beginning, Betha Sarasin aimed to realize a multimedia project to better convey the diversity of her computer-generated spirals. She wanted to discover something new with the spirals, uninfluenced by role models, even though she and her long-time collaborator Markus Ganz were certainly impressed by the minimalism of Philip Glass, the multimedia performances of Laurie Anderson, or the kinetic energy of Jean Tinguely. However, in the early 1980s, the spiral data could not be used in real-time to generate music. The spiral program ran in Fortran, while the music programs used MSX/Basic and MIDI. Therefore, Betha Sarasin and Markus Ganz composed music for the two spirals separately. From the parameter values and 3D data of the spirals, they created a specified sound space through which the spiral melody wandered. Sound field recordings of people, machines, and places complemented this collage in a personal way. In 2024, the multimedia project that Betha Sarasin and Markus Ganz envisioned in 1983 was finally realized.
The current generative system uses up to 46 parameters. It creates unique animated spirals with randomly selected colors and branches. Each spiral is set to spatial music. Each sound score features 10 samples out of a total of 75 from the original spiral music created by Betha Sarasin and Markus Ganz in 1983 using 3D data of a spiral. You hear these samples from the position of the current cube. As a result, the sound shifts with each cube sequence, simultaneously altering the colored backdrop in real-time. Once fully developed, the spiral endlessly traverses its own musical space.
CONTROLS
- Press 'F' for full screen
- Use mouse click to toggle between displaying the cubes, connecting diagonals, and parameter strings
- Use mouse to zoom and move around the spiral
- Press 'S' to save the current frame as a PNG
LICENCE
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
CONTRIBUTORS
Spiralprojekt 1983-1988: Betha Sarasin, Horst Kordisch, Markus Ganz
Spiralprojekt 2003-2004: Betha Sarasin, Peter Amrhein, Markus Ganz
Spiralprojekt 2023-2024: Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin, Markus Ganz
Presented by The Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin and EXPANDED.ART. Curated by Anika Meier.
Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin:
Barbara Ganz, Markus Ganz, Ruth Klein Boeijinga, Therese Steffen, Andreas Wenger, Hans-Florian Zeilhofer
Programming for the Foundation:
Benjamin Berger
Sound Integration:
Guillaume Massol
Consultant of the Foundation:
Armin Blasbichler
