October 07, 2005
TEMPEST
Van Eck
The audiovisual performance TEMPEST--by Erich Berger--draws its name from a U.S government code word for a set of standards for limiting electric or electromagnetic radiation emanations from electronic equipment such as microchips, monitors or printers. In 1985, Wim van Eck published the first unclassified technical analysis of the security risks of emanations from computer monitors. Because of his research radiation from computer monitors is sometimes called "Van Eck Radiation" and the associated surveillance technology "Van Eck ". "Van Eck " means that computer screen content can be reconstructed remotely by picking up the emitted EM-field of the computer screen.
The performance TEMPEST utilizes the basic principles of this technique to transform purely generative graphic into a tight and intense composition of sound, noise and light. Several AM receivers are tuned into different frequencies of a computer screen and their outputs are plugged into an audio mixer for further sound processing. The graphics on the computer screen (seen by the audience via 2 large projections) become a means of producing sound and it is only the generative graphics which determine the different timbres and rhythms. A feed of the audio back into the image generating process adds a chaotic layer and so TEMPEST becomes a synaesthetic instrument mastered by surfing the space of possibilities evolving from this autopoietic process. [via Art from code - Generator.x]
Posted by jo at October 7, 2005 08:45 AM
