» crossorad

The Crossroad is musical installation created by Tomas Dvorak in 2002.

In this project music is generated from the colours of cars which meet on the crossroad. As cars pass by they create impulses which carry the basic informations equal to music like tone and interval, rhytm, structure. This information is used as the source code for the music composition created in realtime.

Cameras shoot and sample colours of incoming cars on the 4 places before traficlights. Visual information is sent to computer which analyzes the data. This results in quadrophonic installation where viewer could observe generation of the music in realtime.

The Crossroad is a project searching out the possibilities of the open music form. This installation works with the idea of something undone/unclosed. Because the work is based not only on musical sequencies, but also on prerecorded samples and loops composed by a program operation on data from the crossroad the author doesn't create the final form of the composition, but he also doesn't let the computer create all the data randomly. It gives the opportunity to work with the opened system -kind of hybrid of finalized and undone- in which in different time always something else happens, while on the other hand basic aspects of the music architecture remain.

Important point of this project is idea that some kind of everyday phenomenon could operate artistic process, in this case proceses of music creation. From this point of the view this work could be taken as a search for the codes of art in the ordinary reality.

Crossroad is based on the computer generative music from the daily life phenomenon source. A brief account could remain Cage's ideas about randomness but Crossorad project focusses on different aspects of the generative music composition. Chance is the very moment of initation, the starting point. Concept of the Crossroad is being driven by the idea of creative process based on the rules. The program for the Crossroad came from observing a real life crossroads and evaluating the long-term effect of the specific traffic pattern in that spot. Crossroad is kind of the place where random processes are being organised. Due to trafic lights and other trafic rules the initial chaos is directed and it is aphected by the rules. This fact is constitutive for the music algorithm generating the music output. Therefore more than identifieng the project as the "random music", it could be compared to musical instrument where the crossroad is the musician operating the instrument.

Another important point is that Floex doesn't aim simply to convert the code of street into code of music. Instead of this he created complex system of the rules which mirrors the relationship of the cars on the crossroad and which reacts as kind of organism to the situation on the street - this brings diferrent, more complex musical output.