Small Fish

Cybernetic Music Spaces

Published 1999, ZKM & Hatje-Cantz. First exhibited at ICC InterCommunication Center Tokyo, 2000. First performed at Ars Electronica Brucknerhouse, 2000

Collaboration with Kiyoshi Furukawa & Masaki Fujihata

Small Fish, Chamber Music with Images for Computer and Player, consists of 15 interactive audio-visual games in which configuration, movements, and collisions of symbols, objects and images are used for controlling a flow of melody, harmony, and rhythm generated in real-time through a MIDI sound synthesiser. Users can interact with this software as a music instrument.  The primary theme of Small Fish is ‘interaction’. It started in 1999 as an interactive music CD-ROM, and over two years evolved into an installation art, a concert, and a workshop version. Throughout all versions, the fundamental underlying artistic concept remained the same. Small Fish presents an electronic canvas for the establishment of highly interactive and playful user involvement in the generation of sound sequences through a manipulation of virtual or embodied objects that form part of the symbolic code. These symbols are simultaneously representations of the musical structure as part of the visual score and central components in the interactive creation of sound as they are defined as instruments with distinct musical qualities or as elements of music notation. The artwork introduces this conceptual amalgamation of the objects’ functionality of both representation and creation within an interactive visual user interface as ‘Active Score Music’.