The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989. and since 1997 is located in a listed industrial building in Karlsruhe, Germany, a former munitions factory. The ZKM (German: Zentrum für Kunst und Medien) organizes special exhibitions and thematic events, conducts research and produces works on the effects of media, digitization, and globalization, and offers public as well as individualized communications and educational programs.The ZKM houses under one roof exhibition spaces, the research platform Hertz Lab, a library and a media library, thus combining research and production, exhibitions and events, archive and collection. The ZKM operates at the interface of art and science, and addresses new knowledge in the area of new technologies to develop it further. Since the death of founding director Heinrich Klotz [de] (1935–1999), the ZKM has been directed by Peter Weibel, later together with Christiane Riedel [de]. Besides the ZKM, the former munitions factory also houses the associated Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe [de] [Municipal Art Gallery of Karlsruhe].
This paper presents an experimental study in post-digital luthiery using origami geometries. We explore how our method of fold sensing creates a new class of digital musical instruments through a case study of music and visual composition and performance. We consider how single-fold and multi-fold gestures afford an exploration of sound as a space, where each fold-sensed crease creates a new variable dimension in the musical parameter space, and multi-fold gestures allow multiple parameters to be controlled through origami gestures. We discuss our fabrication method, including material selection, sensor construction, and the selection of origami patterns. The raw sensor data from the instrument are interpreted with our fold-sensing method that can infer four distinct but related types of gestural interaction, including touch, pressure, single-fold sensing, and multi-fold sensing. The data stream conforms to digital music standards, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and Open Sound Control (OSC). We introduce our open-source software toolkit, designed for fostering artistic experimentation, that implements and supports the musical standards. Our case study includes three distinct artistic strategies for interpreting the data stream and discusses the types of gestures employed by each artist in composition and live performance. We conclude that origami gestures show distinctly new types of expressions for both music and visual digital artists.
Von den Bewegungsmaschinen des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Ära der BioMedien im 21. Jahrhundert: Die Idee vom Leben als genetischer Code schlägt die Brücke zwischen Biologie und Informationstheorie. Das Leben als Chemie wird zum Leben als Information. Dieser Paradigmenwechsel ist für Peter Weibel die Geburtsstunde der biomimetischen Medien. „Ich bin Leben, das leben will, inmitten von Leben, das leben will.“ (Albert Schweitzer, ca. 1918).
