Installation artist Tim Otto Roth has worked with a number of scientific institutions , including ESA to bring to life scientific data through interactive pieces . Wired . co . uk speaks to him about his latest work , a collaboration with a computational neuroscientist , which aims to create an entirely new musical instrument based around the way neurons interact within the brain . Forty - two dinner plate - sized discs of light shiver and pulsate on the floor of the venue . Around them , three piccolo players sit cross - legged , emitting a series of stuttered , syncopated pulses which at once excite and inhibit the shimmering blue discs . Each disc is engorged or diminished by a different pitch , and as the lights grow past a certain threshold , they make a high - pitched piping sound themselves which triggers in turn other sounds , releasing a micro - tonal Mexican wave of electronic sounds that the system ' s creator , artist Tim Otto Roth , describes as a klangteppich -- a " sound carpet ". It may not look much like it at first , but this is your brain on music . Born in the small Black Forest town of Oppenau ( " Few people , many trees ") in 1974 , Tim Otto Roth had little interest in the fine arts while he was growing up . But with the fall of the Berlin Wall , the teenaged Roth bought " by accident " a complete set of East German photo developing gear and promptly set up his own lab in his parents ' cellar . At university , he first studied politics and philosophy , switching after a year to the art school -- not , he insists out of " an arty interest ; more a technical interest , to explore what is photography . " This kind of formal , technical enquiry into the nature of the image has informed his work ever since . His first major project , exhibited in Marburger , Chicago and Berlin , was inspired by Apollinaire ' s poem , Les neufs portes de ton corps and saw him directly exposing the nine " doors " of a woman ' s body onto Ektachrome slide film . This work of crypto - pornography presents itself as a row of ten - by - eight - inch black sheets with dramatic flushes of red and yellow light bursting from white spots in their centres , shooting off in different directions . " It was an erotic work for me , " Roth admits " because it was quite tactile … you really bring the film in touch with the female body . " The bursts of light that give the images their violent effect were achieved with the aid of " a special kind of light source ". This blending of the erotic and the highly technical has since become a characteristic of Roth ' s work . In 2005 - 6 he presented his Pixelsex on the facade of Renzo Piano ' s 96 - metre - tall KPN Tower in Rotterdam . The project , realised in collaboration with Andreas Deutsch ' s bio - modelling group at the Technische Universität Dresden , saw 900 green Planon lamps animated according to the principles of Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann ' s theory of self - replicating automata . Roth is keen to point in particular to the influence of Ulam , who first visualised the theory with the basic computer graphics then available . This gets to the heart of one of the crucial questions for Roth , " What makes a picture today " and the role of scientists in " advancing this concept " towards a " different grammar of how to interact in space ". It was this piece ( and its smaller scale predecessor in Munich in 2003 ) that first pushed Roth towards his current modus operandi of large - scale works in collaboration with scientific researchers which would ultimately see him reaching out to the outer limits of visible space . From The Distant Past saw Roth working with spectrographic data from the Hubble Space Telescope , converting the " the oldest colours of the universe " into a laser diagram first projected on the Palazzo Cavalli - Franchetti in Venice , later at the Hayden Planetarium in New York . This project marked the beginning of a long - standing collaboration between the artist and the European Space Agency , for whom he is now part of a task force to bring the arts and sciences closer together . While working with the ESA , Roth learnt " how essential colour spectra are for astrophysicists " -- a conception which , Roth claims , " completely undermines " the traditional views of artists . Around the same time , he began an artist in residency programme at the ZKM Centre for Media Arts in Karlsruhe , which finally resulted in the Sonapticon -- a sonorous modelling of the firing of neurons in the human brain , first exhibited as part of a conference on neuroaesthetics held at the ZKM just last month . Roth collaborated with mathematical neuroscientist Benjamin Staude to create the piece , comprised of forty - two " audio - neurons " which make up , according to Roth , " a kind of minimalistic quasi - living organism consisting of sound ". The artist , whose parents were both teachers , learnt the clarinet as a child and was able to haul his old instrument out of retirement to test early versions of the Sonapticon . Taking his inspiration from MIT professor Tommaso Toffoli ' sdescription of the operation of cellular automata as a " universal synthesiser ", Roth regards his creation as " a new instrument ". The performance at the ZKM the other week was just " the proof of principle , " he says . " It ' s not only a sound installation . If you work on it , you really can produce something like music . " So , I ask , should we look forward in the future to a concerto for orchestra and Sonapticon taking its place in the symphonic repertoire ? " Why not ? " he replies . Watch this space . 사업자 정보 표시 | | | 사업자 등록 번호 : -- | TEL : -- | 사이버 몰의 이용 약관 바로 가 기