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"SE/30 :: Welcome to the 20th century back!".

At the origin:
It must have been almost 10 years ago now. Ernst & Young wanted to get rid of their Mac's SE/30. Young Farmers Claim Future found out and bought 20 of them including the ethernet cards, little microphones, mice and keyboards.
At that time they were working with an early version of Max on Apple OS, the MIDI-only version. The good thing was that it included objects for serial communication and control of QuickTime instruments.
Their plan was to create an audiovisual orchestra with the SE/30s. The major lines of behavior were to be implemented in a score on a nice big new computer which would update the 20 individual scores on each player/computer by ethernet connection.
They never got started on the project... due to belgian cultural-political operations the commission was cancelled.

Today's implementation:
Code31 inherited the 20 SE's from Young Farmers Claim Future, and started to develop an installation based upon cellular automata.
Cellular automata are algorithms based on the following principle: the state of a cell is a function of the states of neighbouring cells. A rule is chosen to determine this function.
Since all cells are equal, if you choose a good rule, complex patterns emerge. Each SE/30 is a cell and adapts itself to it's neighbourhood, thereby forming patterns of collaboration...

Image and sound:
The sound is modulated and the image is plotted by the state of the computer that's generating it. In the realm of General Midi and Quicktime Musical Instruments, aesthetics of error is a necessity. Digital artifacts render cellular phone-like- timbres into abstract textures.
The heavy burden of the image, sound and communication processes, forces the computer to accelerate/decelerate analogous to the complexity of the current state, thereby creating a continuum - a kinetic paradigm - twisting hyperbolic structures to infinity, abruptly but effortlessly reclining to a newly attained quantum level, recursing into a neverending loop, with one sole, definite goal : a merciless kernel panic, driving this relic of a long gone age to the digital cemetery where it belongs ...