2006

Supported by: National Cultural Foundation, Bose Sound Studio, Zaj Studio
Special thanks to Balázs Kovács (xrc), Pataki Zoltán, Péter Márton (prell) 
Venue: House of Future, Budapest

The C-MACHINE, or “critical-machine” reflects on Alan Turing’s mathematical automatons. Having learned from the deficiencies of the famous Turing Machine – the ancestor of today’s computers – the scientist wanted the machine’s reactions to be only partially determined by configuration.
Thus, with time, he created a number of other automatons with ever-increasing degrees of interactiveness. It is precisely the limits to the culture of interaction that the C-MACHINE, based on the Turing models, seeks to draw our attention to. 
The installation outlines and interprets the operation of closed and linear interactions, which can only handle closed conditions, and which have become widespread in the areas of technological innovation, media art and new media. In the darkened room the visitors, through their movements, bring various sounds to life whose loudness is controlled by a sound matrix.
Here, in contrast to what we are used to, the closer the listener gets to a speaker, the quieter the sound of the frequency assigned to the spatial position will become. In passing the middle of the room, the audience is warned by a flashing light: although in theory they have reached the “very centre of the interaction,” they are nevertheless excluded from the reactive mechanism.