Eutropia was premiered in June 2018 by the ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion within the concert "Time Expandings II" at Konzerthaus Berlin.
Sawami Kiyoshi, piano
Adam Weisman, percussion
Andre Bartetzki, electronics and projection
Eutropia is mostly based on the same structures and algorithms as my piece morphony for audio-visual electronics.
video recording of the premiere:
In the early 1950s the British mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing also worked on problems of theoretical biology. In his paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" he described principles for the spontaneous evolution of patterns, like stripes, spots, spirals or waves, from a nearly homogeneous mixture of substances in cells. This was one of the earliest computational models for the generation of structures like the well-known patterns on animals skins or the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem.
At the same time the Russian biochemist Boris Belousov accidentally discovered, without knowing Turing's work, a chemical oscillation, which appeared as periodical color changes in a homogeneous mixture of several substances. Belousov couldn't publish a paper about his findings because at that time most experts didn't consider such chemical oscillations possible. Only 10 years later his experiments were recapitulated and extended by the young physicist Anatol Zhabotinsky. His studies now attracted much more interest and finally the so-called reaction-diffusion systems became part of the broad field of interdisciplinary research on non-equilibrium systems where the evolution of structures in living and non-living nature is investigated by system-theoretical means.
Eutropia is one of the "trading cities" in Italo Calvino's "Le città invisibili"
In this piece piano, percussion and audio electronics constitute together with the video projection a large inter media audio-visual reaction-diffusion system. In the same way as in a laboratory variable mixing ratios, varying reaction speeds or petri-dishes of different sizes will produce different results, stable or unstable system states, patterns and standing or moving waves, in this piece the instrumental voices are organized like substances, sound material is being varied and developed and formal parts are shaped in order to gain a wide range of sounding and visual outcomes. The chemical model can be always watched on the screen - but the projection doesn't just double the music by visualization. The generation of the picture is rather part of the reaction loop of the instrumental-audio-visual system. The picture changes the sound and in return the musicians and the audio electronics control the visual changes of the system.
The programming of Eutropia has been done with SuperCollder (for audio, scheduling and OSC communication) and openFramework / OpenGL (for video and simulation of the reaction-diffusion system). Many parameters of the system, of sound and video are changed and finetuned in real-time via MIDI controllers and a tablet (OSC).