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Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for Cyberarts Prix Ars Electronica 2008 Interactive Art
Computer Animation / Film / VFX
Digital Communities
Digital Musics
Hybrid Art
Interactive Art
Jury
media.art.research
u19 - freestyle computing
Absolut Quartet
Jeff Lieberman, Dan Paluska (US)
Awards of Distinction ”Interactive Art” 2008

The Absolut Quartet is an invitation to enter into a creative dialog with a robot orchestra. There’s a trio of robots, and the human user makes it an even quartet. The latter gets things started by composing a motif and inputting it via the Internet; this lays the musical groundwork for a unique three-minute concert by the user’s robotic bandmates. The performance is recorded and saved to memory in a Web gallery. Absolut Quartet makes the Internet an interface that enables users to conceive works of art in the real world and store them in the virtual one. Moreover, the complexity of the robotic instruments is truly impressive: for instance, a six-meter-long marimba (a subspecies of xylophone) that’s played by 40 two-armed robots firing tiny rubber balls with astounding accuracy at the instrument’s wooden bars. Or a tonal array of 35 wineglasses made to reverberate by a robotic finger flitting above them. Via Internet, the human creator can take in the performance of his/her piece. Absolut Quartet receives a 2008 Distinction.



Source: Jeff Lieberman, Dan Paluska (US)

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