At this year’s Sonic Acts festival I had an encounter with Rechnender Raum, a wonderful, seemingly living installation created by Ralf Baecker, operating similar to a basic artificial neural network. The open construction allows visitors to see every single moving detail of the machine. 

I was amazed by the complexity of the fragile wooden structure and the network of strings, all connected to the moving outline of a torus in the center of the installation. 

While Rechnender Raum (German for calculating space) gives us a lot to look at, and it is nice to walk around the structure and inspect every small element up-close, I also enjoyed the soft, insect-like chirping of the small electronic motors keeping the network alive and slowly moving.