Interactive art | Fractal Sound Landscape artwork by Walter Perdan.

Fractal Sound Landscape is an artwork of interactive art by Walter Perdan.

Show Ear Candies (june 2010) at Academy of fine arts, Bologna, text presented for the show-book:

Fractal Sound Landscape is the result of a research begun over one year ago, born of an interest in interactive technologies and a curiosity for an "unusual" range of sound-art. The work is a video-installation, documenting an experience that the user may enter as a "virtual" space. Basically I have created a landscape in which, by interacting with it, the user may create visual and sound events. The objects inside - the lanscape, the sky, and their exterior aspect - are made by the mathematical functions of fractals. Several of the sounds are taken from natural events ( mountain stream, etc.), others are generated from the virtual scene itself. Screenshots from the virtual scene have been transformed into sound with specifical software. My thought was to present a "self-generating" lansdcape sound. Another part of the soundscape is created with a software that creates a MIDI score from fractal algorithms, cellular automata and other functions.

Fractals are a relatively recent discovery in science and art. Discovered almost a chance by Benoit Mandelbrot in the eighties, fractals give us a key to reading the natural world... A fractal is a mathematical object with self-referential character. If we zoom into it, the microscopic view will preserve the same characteristics. This peculiarity is kept even if we extend this process to infinity. One of the most charming features is that fractals are generally finite forms with a finite area but with an infinite perimeter. They are part of Nature but, paradoxically, present a parallel reality to it, a cyberspace to discover and investigate deeper still today.

Fractal Sound Landscape is intended as a first experiment of Generative and Interactive art.