Generative audio installation / Live performance
Broken Rooms
KultProekt Gallery, Moscow / Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
Broken Rooms is a generative audio installation created for Kirill Rave’s exhibition work in the parallel programme of the 2017 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. Field recordings pass through a network of more than 300 random generators, forming a continuously changing composition. At the opening, we began to play alongside this system. That encounter became the beginning of Broken Composers.
A city, recorded
The work begins with field recordings: the hum of evening traffic, a subway station before midnight, echoes from a basketball court in a residential neighbourhood, a beginner cellist in a street underpass, and the chimes of the bell tower over snow-covered Red Square.
An orchestra of random generators
More than 300 random generators work together. One cuts incoming audio into fragments lasting from milliseconds to several minutes. Another arranges the fragments into rhythmic sequences; a third transforms a sound into a tune. Others introduce occasional effects, including an extended echo.
We approached this network like an orchestra or a conveyor belt: each element has a small role, while their interaction produces an evolving composition. The installation explores how chaos and order emerge and flow into one another.
Inside the exhibition
Broken Rooms developed alongside Kirill Rave’s visual work at KultProekt Gallery in the parallel programme of the 2017 Moscow Biennale. In his account of the exhibition, Rave recalls screens with glitch avatars flickering and displaying error messages. He continued experimenting with these events inside the exhibition; this became the setting in which the duo’s audiovisual practice began.
Playing with the system
At the exhibition opening, we assigned the generative process the roles of conductor and lead musician and began playing along with it. That moment defined our approach to making work and gave Broken Composers its name.
From installation to release
The music associated with Broken Rooms was released as an eight-track album on 6 April 2019. The release shares the installation’s title; the exhibition work and its opening performance date to 2017.
