Autarkeia Aggregatum is a digital tableau vivant: a swarming mass, consisting of 11 000 digital ’monads’ in continuous movement, drawing a charmingly alive and hypnotic tissue on the screen.

BRET BATTEY (UK): AUTARKEIA AGGREGATUM [09:30 min, 2005]

Autarkeia Aggregatum is an integrated sound and image composition emphasizing continuous flow and transformation. There are no cuts or splices in the visual aspect of the work; it unfolds instead as a constantly evolving, massed animation of a set of over 11,000 individual points.

> TECHNICAL NOTE: I produced the sound for the film with the help of the musical composition and synthesis programming languages Common Lisp Music (by Bill Shotstaedt) and Common Music (by Rick Taube). A primary tool was my Pitch Curve Analysis and Composition toolkit (PICACS) for providing naturalistic and expressive glissandi and continuous-pitch melodies. The animation technique involves various rotational algorithms, constrained Brownian motion, and time blurring. I initially developed the visual effects method using the Java programming environment Processing (by Ben Fry and Casey Reas). I then translated the algorithm into a plug-in for Apple’s Motion 2 video effects software.

“When seeking a title for the piece, I turned to the Monadology — the Philosopher Leibniz’s Theory of fundamental particles of reality (monads). I appropriated the two words from that work: autarkeia (Greek) for self-sufficiency, and aggregatum (Latin) meaning joined, aggregated. The terms together appropriately suggest an aggregation of the activities of autonomous entities. More subtly, a resonance with Classicism draws me to the words. The resonance is one of an inner fullness of being expressed outwardly in elegant, self-sufficient restraint.“

PREMIERE: Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, Seattle, US, October 2005

> www.BatHatMedia.com

BRET BATTEY (b. 1967) creates electronic, acoustic, and multimedia concert works and installations, synthesizing a diverse professional and educational background in music composition, computer programming, graphic and web design, and electronics. He has been a Fulbright Fellow to India and a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and he has received recognitions and prizes from Austria’s Prix Ars Electronica, France’s Bourges Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique, Spain’s Punto y Raya Festival, Abstracta Cinema of Rome, and Amsterdam Film eXperience for his sound and image compositions