last manoeuvres in the dark

last manoeuvres in the dark

08_2008

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conception : fabien giraud and raphaël siboni
synthesizers : olivier pasquet
musical cybernetics : robin meier et frédéric voisin
neural network learning : franck rivoire

Last Manoeuvres in the Dark was presented at Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2008. With a malefic artificial intelligence, an army of Dark Vaders is automatically composing the charts from the Darkness. The installation is constituted of 300 Dark Vaders helmets. This military formation could come back from the Xian’s army with its 6000 warriors.

Each helmet contains a computer. It is linked together with all the other heads and a huge central black cubic machine. The overall is an artificial intelligence system using neural networks (actually a kind of self organizing map) composing in real-time the darkest pop music along the day. Each song is about 20 minutes long.
More explanation can be found on Frederic Voisin‘s website. A context of the piece can be read on the Maxime Thieffine‘s blog.

last manoeuvres in the dark