06 SPOTLIGHT: dTHEd
dTHEd is a multidisciplinary art group composed of Fabio Ricci, Simone Lanari, Isobel Blank, and various machines and algorithms. Their work spans not only multiple disciplines, but multiple forms of creative endeavour — including musical, video, and graphic output, alongside performances, concerts, interviews, and social experiments.
dTHEd draw inspiration from scientific concepts and debates, and they are currently exploring two intellectual strands: Neurodiversity, the idea that variation exists in the way that different brains function, and that a spectrum of responses should be recognised as existing, and not necessarily pathologised (den Houting, 2019), and The Anthropocene, the concept that human activity is leaving observable marks in the planet’s geological record (Crutzen, 2002; 2006; Steffen et al., 2007; Castree, 2014). Their latest musical release, hyperbeatz vol.1 (2019), draws upon Timothy Morton’s theory of Hyperobjects (Morton, 2013) — that there are concepts so large that they are no longer perceived as specific to one time or space (ibid.). Just as Timothy Morton asserts that humans have become cyborgs of sorts, including all sorts of non-human components (Morton, 2013), dTHEd incorporate a palette of electronic techniques to craft music which goes beyond human aesthetic choices and physical capacities — creating music that can not necessarily be performed or recreated ex-post.
We were excited to talk to dTHEd about constructing impossible rhythms, developing a digital Oracle, and whether maths can be considered psychedelic.
dTHEd, multimedia art trio, 2019. hyperbeatz vol.1. Image credit: dTHEd
1) What is the inspiration/motivation behind your sciarts crossover approach? Why does interdisciplinarity intrigue you, and how did you progress into crossover work?
Simone: I started studying music when I was very young. My passion has always been to produce original music, rather than excelling as a performer. I have always felt the need to develop my own expressive language and soon realised that the standard academic studies might be too restrictive. Then I found the electronic music course at the conservatory in Florence, where I was able to study sound in the broadest sense of the term, and I finally found the freedom to define new rules.
Examples of great composers, like Xenakis, enlightened me on the creative potential in applying scientific principles to musical composition. However, I always feel my music needs to be grounded in instinctive inspiration, the type of thing that arises during an improvisation, for example. When I am at work, I like to imagine myself in an alchemical laboratory, cataloguing the elements and defining the basic principles of a world that I want to generate and in which I want to operate. Within that world and according to those rules I need to move freely, to tell a story.
When Fabio suggested that we tackle themes such as neurodiversity and hyper-objects I was immediately enthusiastic because, besides being topics that I personally felt close to, they have inspired us to create a truly vast audio/visual ecosystem to explore, with extremely wide boundaries.
ჰܒ݂ܳܨܳE, Digital media, 2020. Image credit: dTHEd
Isobel: Personally, my father is a chemical researcher and I learned from the beginning that creativity is not purely a prerogative of artistic disciplines. I have always experienced first-hand and with passion the ingenuity and art present in science, marvelling at the inventions he patented. As a teenager, my first attempt to experiment it in art, which then became my profession, was melting resins at home with him in search for a new sculpture material. My studies in aesthetics have only deepened the issue in many respects, joining the early inspiration and allowing me to proceed quite spontaneously in crossing disciplines.
圕ꝏ圕, , Digital media, 2020. Image credit: dTHEd
Fabio: Having studied theoretical physics, my approach to things is always scientific to some degree. I really like the scientific method and I tend to apply it to many aspects of life, from day-to-day activities to artistic processes. I am a very rational person, I like logic, I like the joy of causal reasoning. But even more than that, I like mathematics. Mathematics is psychedelic. If you’re looking for a crossover discipline, that’s one! Think how linked to science it is, yet how it defies the scientific method completely. Once a rule or a set of rules is defined, then a whole world pours out. That’s the exact opposite of the scientific method! Proponents such as Paul Lockhart (Lockhart, 2009) say that mathematics should be considered an art, rather than a technical or scientific discipline. I tend to agree.
When I was younger I got incredibly hooked by authors from the OuLiPo movement (e.g. Queneau, 1947; 1961; Perec, 1969; 1972; 1978; Calvino, 1973; 1979). What was so fascinating to my eyes was that they applied maths to literature — they created a set of rules and then had to work their way out of them with a coherent artistic piece. Without those rules in the first place, those books and poems would have never existed. As with maths: without Euclid’s fifth postulate (cfr. The Elements, Book 1) you simply don’t get the standard geometry. Change a postulate and you’re in a different world, different dynamics, different results (Poincaré, 1882; Trudeau, 2008).
Nowadays this seems almost naïve — a lot of artists are starting from restricted domains: software GUIs, algorithms, AIs, etc. All have embedded rules that you either assign yourself or are forced to work within starting with someone else’s decisions. How things are designed before you can work with them sets the geography of your production and determines how you move across that landscape. There’s a lot of ‘trial and error’ going on today, in scientific-method terminology. So that wasn’t interesting me so much anymore (personally I like to make machines go wrong, but that’s another story).
Things really changed the moment I had to confront myself with something that is completely counterintuitive, bordering the limits of that which we consider humanly comprehensible or accessible: neurodiversity. It’s safe to say that neurodiversity is the main inspiration for our cross-over art.
Inspiration initially struck when I was studying Object Oriented Ontology (Harman, 2002) and reading Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton (2013). I was surprised to see how autism and other forms of ND manifest similar characteristics to those that Morton assigns to his hyperobjects. In his book, Morton gives his own examples of music that, for him, represent a hyperobject, but never quite explains why. I was challenged to find a way to define a hypermusic myself, because Morton doesn’t do so.
At the same time, I was also studying the cognitive basis of rhythmic perception and reading about linguistics. It’s astonishing to think that, at a fundamental level, humans have rhythm and language hardwired. Setting aside cultural and behavioural variations and nuances arising exogenously, we are basically all born with them (e.g. London, 2012; Rebuschat, 2012; Fitch, 2013; Kotz, 2018), or at least with native instruments to build both. They are not developed ex-post from scratch. Noam Chomsky speaks about Language Acquisition Devices (Chomsky, 1965) — I think we can talk about rhythm acquisition devices too! Some recent studies led by Andrea Moro have neuro-biologically proven what Chomsky and others had hypothesized: we can construct artificial languages that are humanly ‘impossible’ meaning that they are completely unnatural, they don’t follow the standard recursive rules of all other ‘human’ languages; they cannot exist outside a lab (Moro, 2016). Through functional neuroimaging they have seen that humans activate different brain sectors when they are forced to learn and use these impossible languages, with respect to the brain sectors activated by normal language usage. They are somehow forced to work differently if they cannot use the recursive patterns that natural language does. The analogy with rhythm still holds: rhythm is all about patterns.
The way we perceive the tactus is different from the way we understand and organize meter (e.g. London, 2012; Fitch, 2013).
Similarly to Moro’s experiments, my idea was to try to construct ‘impossible’ rhythms, i.e. ones that no human being could ever truly replicate (not even mentally) and that — potentially — would activate different brain areas if listened to or pseudo-performed. I called them hyperbeatz linking them to Morton’s hyperobjects, as my ultimate aim was to figure out a way to define — somewhat arbitrarily — a hypermusic, starting from rhythm. The link to ND finally comes back when I was reading about particular savants — while they might be lacking some of the most basic natural acquisition devices, an ‘impossible’ rhythm could be completely natural and comprehensible to them — they might enjoy or find a harmonious sense in those aspects which appear as meaningless to the rest of us.
This is where our journey started.
იเᄃ , Digital media, 2020. Image credit: dTHEd
2) What are the creative, technical, and scientific processes involved in your work?
Musically speaking, our processes are all over the place. We are as likely to be fiddling with generative processes as with an acoustic guitar. We don’t limit ourselves. Our starting point is usually always a hyper-rhythm that has some internal rules which are overly complex and not easily identifiable. Then, we try to build all the instruments’ voices and their relationships around the rhythm and its rules. If we’re working on an album, we tend to write shorter pieces that have a song-like structure. When working on our digital ȜႮȠFरि☰☰ series, we are more inclined to use improvised structures. After all we began as musicians, so music remains our main output and field of work.
Visually, we take inspiration from different ND symptoms — things like prosopagnosia — the inability to recognize people’s faces, even the most familiar (sometimes even one’s own). That’s why we design a lot of ‘masks’ on headshots, often with the help of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). These masks resemble a sort of joyful and colourful interference between the viewer and the receiver. We also work on pictures of specific MRI brain scans and process them with different digital software and through AIs. Overall, we are interested in how brains react when they are overstimulated and possibly fail in categorizing the stimuli into comprehensible patterns. In such cases there is a potential disconnect between the stimuli and what a receiver is able to elaborate cognitively. That’s the precise point where we like to stand; trying to simulate the more unusual experiences ND individuals experience when elaborating everyday stimuli, due to their alternative sensory processing (we don’t like using the word ‘disorder’, as in the acronym SPD).
3) And what are you working on currently?
Photo elaboration of Yosuke Fuyama through GANs, for our interview series, digital media, 2020.
Image credit: dTHEd
These days, we are finalizing a second release from our ȜႮȠFरि☰☰ series. These are longer audio suites (in the order of 15 minutes), available only in digital format on our bandcamp page, paywalled at a low and symbolic price (3 euros in total: 1 euro per artist). We also have a second LP in the pipeline, basically ready, though we are more inclined to define a release date for this full-length only once it is possible to perform live again. This second album is less ‘scientific’, less conceptual and more musical. In the meantime, we are already starting to design a third work, in which we will resume the experimentation on our tactus and meter for new hyperbeatz: building/coding different pieces of software that will allow us to create rhythms out of specific rules, in multiple ways.
In parallel to music, we are developing an in-house AI based on our ongoing interview project, to be hosted on our website. (By the way, anyone who wishes to be interviewed by us can contact us here). We still don’t know exactly how we are going to use it, currently we are experimenting with different trainings and outputs. The idea is to create a sort of digital Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, but one that is only able to answer questions on hypermusic and art for/from neurodiverse individuals — a self-sufficient, generative (albeit very weird) ‘collective knowledge’ trained through the answers we received from our interviews. This AI plus the masks we design for the interviews will also be used for site-specific A/V installations.
Together with the artist Scual, we are creating an interactive music video/web-installation which will be later ported to VR and as stand-alone A/V installation. We are creating an immersive music-driven particle-system affected by the user. Your movements and interactions with objects in space will modify/create the environment itself and the music score as it unfolds. Every experience will be unique and different.
Finally, we are about to make available limited runs of high-end prints of a selection of stills we published on our instagram page. We are working on giclée prints on fine paper, but also prints on plexiglass… one of the synthetic materials that has become a symbol of this pandemic era!
All in all, we have a lot going on, but, given the very peculiar nature of this year, we have decided to concentrate our efforts in studying and designing new artworks and processes, rather than delivering outputs based on consolidated methods. Many of these things will hopefully see the light in 2021.
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Web-interactive installation preview/ Particle-based audio-reactive brush instancing testmusic: dTHEdvideo: scualdthed.netscual.net
4) What new aspects of science and technology are you interested to explore for future projects?
We are interested in a wide array of different things that can inspire us towards uncharted rhythmical and visual territories. Anything that has a pattern can be transformed in a rhythm: DNA sequencing, gene mutations, prime numbers, etc. Researchers in ND often speak about ‘connectivity patterns’ in brain regions (Coben & Myers, 2008). So we are interested in embedding these brain patterns into our research, through ad-hoc coding.
ఆՀϿ, Digital media, 2020 Image credit: dTHEd
Given the surprising similarities between AIs and ND behaviour (AIs manifest many of Morton’s hyperobjects properties, just like ND and, to a certain extent, we could almost define AIs as “neurodiverse” too), we are excited to explore that domain further. We will definitely play around with the generation of drum sounds and patterns from artificial intelligence and GANs in the coming future. AIs today represent a perfect example of science-art crossover — you can use them to generate artistic pieces, or they can assist you in scientific discoveries, the difference is sometimes so subtle that it disappears. We can easily imagine that a training performed on images (e.g. brain scans) for purely artistic purposes could reveal insights for scientific purposes (predicting brain damage patterns, etc.).
We also would like to develop some of our digital masks into actual physical, wearable masks — thus looking into bioplastics and other new “intelligent” materials, building on Isobel’s experience with materials.
As we believe our project also has a social dimension, we’ve initiated a discussion with some NGOs who work with autistic people and their families, in order to build protocols for targeted artworks done in collaboration with ND individuals; a mixture of music, behavioural therapy, multi-sensorial experience and play. We are now writing together a proposal which will map out precise protocols, rules, professional operators needed, etc. The aim being to co-create artwork with/for neurodiverse individuals and possibly define an open-source format that other NGOs, music therapists, and interested actors could replicate.
We would also love to get access and experiment with fMRI together with professional drummers — to assess their brain functioning when exposed to hyperbeatz. To this end, we are developing a first ‘zero draft’ of the model of the experiments, without brain scans. If they work and the project gets traction, then we’ll look into ways of bringing it into a lab.
Where can we find your work currently and do you have any planned/scheduled exhibitions?
All the performances, university talks and installations booked for 2020 were, unfortunately, cancelled due to the pandemic emergency. At the moment, we are re-scheduling participations in festivals and other events, both online and physical (though who knows when the situation will allow us to attend events). If you wish to support us, you can find our music on our bandcamp channel, while on instagram you can see our audiovisual productions (often these are fragments of our work in progress). We also have a website, which is more like a noisy portfolio. All of our interviews and some of our preferred graphics are hosted there. Prints will soon be available as well.
ɮϘբ, Digital media, 2020. Image credit: dTHEd
References:
Calvino, I., (1973). Il castello dei destini incrociati. Torino: Einaudi
Calvino, I., (1979). Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. Torino: Einaudi
Chomsky, N., (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Coben, R., & Myers T.E., (2008) Connectivity Theory of Autism: Use of Connectivity Measures in Assessing and Treating Autistic Disorders. Journal of Neurotherapy, 12(2-3), pp.161-179.
Euclid., (300 BC), ca. Elements, Book 1.
Fitch, W.T., (2013). Rhythmic cognition in humans and animals: distinguishing meter and pulse perception. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 7, p.68.
Harman, G., (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court
Kotz, S.A., Ravignani, A., & Fitch, W.T., (2018). The Evolution of Rhythm Processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(10), pp.896-910.Lockhart, P., (2009). A Mathematician's Lament: How school cheats us out of our most fascinating and imaginative art form. New York: Bellevue Literary Press.
London, J., (2012). Hearing in time: Psychological aspects of musical meter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moro, A. 2016. Impossible Languages. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Morton, T., (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota
Perec, G., (1969). La Disparition. Paris: Gallimard.
Perec, G., (1972). Les revenentes. Paris: Julliard.
Perec, G., (1978). La Vie mode d'emploi. Paris: Fayard.
Poincaré, H., (1882). Théorie des groupes fuchsiens. Acta mathematica, 1, pp.1-62.
Queneau, R., (1961). Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Paris: Gallimard.
Queneau, R., (1947). Exercices de style. Paris: Gallimard.
Rebuschat, P., Rohrmeier, M., Hawkins, J.A., Cross, I., (2012). Language and Music as Cognitive Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trudeau, R., (2008). The Non-Euclidean Revolution. Boston : Birkhäuser
More on dTHEd can be found at: Website • Bandcamp • Instagram • Facebook
All images and videos shown courtesy of © 2020 dTHEd