Scale is a bio-art collaboration with neurobiologist/ engineer Malcolm MacIver, visual/ conceptual artist Marlena Novak, and composer/ sound designer Jay Alan Yim. It is being presented at STRP Festival, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

This audience-interactive installation involves electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a ‘choir’ whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The interface for Scale incorporates custom-designed software, a hacked Wiimote ‘conductor’s baton’ that participants can use to ‘cue’ individual fish so their unadulterated tones (as well as digitally processed versions) can be heard through the audio system, a touchscreen panel to allow for changes in volume, and arrays of LEDs under each tank to provide visual feedback to visitors. Our Amazonian choir members are housed in individual tanks arranged in an arc, comfortably maintained with a sophisticated filtration and water conditioning system, and outfitted with a 12-channel speaker array.

Malcolm MacIver studies electric fish and aims to apply what he learns to the development of underwater robots. To engage the community in an experience of this beautiful fish from the Amazon jungle (which has contributed greatly to our understanding of the brain over the past forty years), MacIver, Novak and Yim have combined their diverse talents to develop an immersive sight and sound experience.