gedankenzettel

gears and gardens

Two pieces that are less instrument and more place.

Räderwerk is a drawing machine made of brass: gears drive pen arms, the pens draw on a turning plate, and a chaotic double pendulum tugs at everything. The teeth hum, cams pluck a music box. It is the closest thing to a harmonograph I have ever built.

Gengarten 64 is a garden in the colours of a Commodore 64. Every plant carries a genome, crosses with its neighbours and mutates, so new species appear on their own. Mostly you just watch. It keeps growing while you are away.

Also repaired: the 2004 time capsule. Galleries 2 to 6 were there all along but could not be reached; now they can. The little eggs in the old music section did not survive the Wayback copy, so they were redrawn.

how the instruments came about

Next to pictures and music, the old site had one more idea that never got finished: things you can play with yourself. That part is new.

It started with two synthesizers: Rauschuhr, twelve noise voices arranged like the hours on a clock, and Konsonanzgitter, sixteen FM voices in a grid with one switch that keeps every note consonant with every other. Then three ideas from my notebook became tools of their own: Sternenfeld, a night sky from a seed word; Irrgarten, a labyrinth you can watch being dug; and Taktwerk, a drum machine whose rhythms come from rules instead of hands.

They all run in your browser. No samples, no plugins, and nothing is sent to this server.