The Finnish artist Marko Timlin in a concert and performance in the dark will play a new sensor-based instrument SENSOR_SOUND_MACHINE at the RIXC Gallery, Lencu iela 2, Thursday, December 14, 2023 at 20:00. Playing this instrument is like sculpting sounds in time: the artist is controlling and shaping the sounds with his hands and body as well as with light.

The SENSOR_SOUND_MACHINE is an invention connecting the physical world with the digital world. Ultrasonic sensors, solar panels, infrared sensors and an arduino microcontroller receive information from the physical world and transmit this data to a computer where it is used to generate and control digital audio feedbacks.  

The instrument’s sounds are based entirely on digital audio feedback making use of their chaotic nature. It does not imitate the sound of existing acoustic or electronic instruments, but rather presents the listeners a purely digital sound aesthetic imitating the chaotic behavior of natural phenomena! Playing the instrument generates complexity: richly organized sonic patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes predictable and sometimes unpredictable. 

Through the delicate interplay between human performer and sensor-based instrument highly complex and vivid digital sound worlds emerge. Playing this instrument is like sculpting sounds in time: the artist is controlling and shaping the sounds with his hands and body as well as with light. 

Imagine the vision of a man-machine: the harmonic interplay between the world of the organic and the world of the machine, giving rise through this synthesis to something new that has been made with the technology of our time, of our generation, which would not have been feasible previously without this technology.

Currently the BITS AND BYTES exhibition by Marko Timlin is on-view at the RIXC Gallery, Lencu iela 2 until February 3, 2024, Wednesday-Saturday, 12:00-18:00.

Marko Timlin creates artworks that link science with art, technology with nature and the past with the present. His artistic work centers on the development of kinetic sound installations and performances with self-made sound machines.

His approach is part of a broader perspective of a peaceful coexistence between the human and the machine. With his artistic inventions he proves that both can work together to create experiences that transcend them. 

In the recently published anthology covering Finnish media art´s last century (“Suomalaisen mediataiteen ensimmäinen vuosisata”) Timlin is named as a successor of inventive genius Erkki Kurenniemi.

Timlin’s works have been exhibited and performed world-wide including at Whitebox New York (USA), Sight & Sound Festival Montréal (CA), Fylkingen Stockholm (SE), Kiasma Helsinki (FI), EOF gallery Paris (FR), E:vent gallery London (UK), Piksel Festival (NO) and Neues Museum Nürnberg (DE). www.timlin.de  

Contact us: rixc@rixc.org,  +371 67228478 (Office), +371 25358541 (Līva Siliņa)

Supported by the Nordic Culture Point, Riga city council, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.

RIXC Center for New Media Culture has received mobility funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish RIXC Art Science Residencies.