SPIRALPROJEKT

"The cube can stand on its own, stacked on top of its peers, joined in a row, as a square or tower, as a precisely formulated large or small sculpture. The simple basic form invites you to play." 

– Betha Sarasin (1930–2016)

In 1983, artist Betha Sarasin and musician Markus Ganz started to develop SPIRALPROJEKT, a generative multimedia project, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute. Sarasin wanted to achieve an orderly spatial movement for the cube, to make it fly and capture infinity. In 2024, the multimedia project that Sarasin and Ganz thought up was finally realized. 

In the early 1980s, it was not possible, among others, to generate music in real time. Forty years later, EXPANDED.ART and the Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin present SPIRALPROJEKT, powered by Highlight and curated by Anika Meier.

SPIRALPROJEKT was adapted to P5.js by coder Benjamin Berger. It creates unique animated spirals with randomly selected colors and branches. Each spiral is set to spatial music. The sound shifts with each cube sequence, simultaneously altering the colored backdrop in real time. Once fully developed, the spiral endlessly traverses its own musical space.

HISTORY
Sarasin wanted to realize a multimedia project in order to better convey the diversity of her computer-generated spirals. These spirals are formed by algorithmically evolving sequences of cubes. Since it was not possible to emulate the software on a PC in the mid-1980s, it fell into oblivion. 

At that time, the spiral data could not be used in real time to generate music. The spiral program ran in Fortran; the music programs used MSX/Basic and MIDI. Therefore, Sarasin and Ganz composed music for two spirals separately. From the parameter values and 3D data of the spirals, they created a specified sound space through which the spiral melody wandered. Sound field recordings of people, machines, and places complemented this collage in a personal way. 

The current generative system uses up to 46 parameters. It creates unique animated spirals with randomly selected colors and branches. Each spiral is set to spatial music. Each sound score features 10 samples out of a total of 75 from the original spiral music created by Betha Sarasin and Markus Ganz in 1983 using 3D data of a spiral. You hear these samples from the position of the current cube. As a result, the sound shifts with each cube sequence, simultaneously altering the colored backdrop in real time. Once fully developed, the spiral endlessly traverses its own musical space.

COLORS
"When Betha and I wanted to work on spirals in the early 1980s, we had to travel from Basel to the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. There, we discussed possible further developments with Dr. Ing. Horst Kordisch and Franz Doll, while Betha's husband, Teff, often translated artistic wishes into geometric constructions. The changes to the software that this required could usually only be implemented during our next visit. After the meeting, there was typically little time left at the institute's computer to generate and plot spirals, as this process took much longer back then than it does today.

One of Betha's wishes was to include colors. Although she loved the strictly straight black line, she also wanted to contrast it with color and figurative elements. She achieved the latter by combining spirals with figurative drawings; however, the former was difficult to implement. Even back then, there were a few colored pens that could be used with the plotter, but she didn’t like their colors.

She was all the more pleased when Peter Amrhein's emulation of the spiral software in 2003/2004 not only allowed for the choice of many colors but also for color gradients. With the new software implementation using P5.js, colors and color gradients could be applied much more subtly. We tried to match Betha Sarasin's color preferences, which can be seen in her works. This applies to the color of the spiral lines (of the iterations, 50% are in classic black and white, 30% in a two-color palette, and 20% in vibrant multicolor) as well as to that of the background. Additionally, the generatively determined music not only influences the colors and shapes of the background but also makes it pulsate accordingly."

– Markus Ganz

CONTROLS
▪ Press 'F' for full screen
▪ Use mouse click to toggle between displaying the cubes, connecting diagonals, and parameter strings
▪ Use mouse to zoom and move around the spiral
▪ Press 'S' to save the current frame as a PNG

LICENCE
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

CONTRIBUTORS
1983-1988: Betha Sarasin, Horst Kordisch, Markus Ganz
2003-2004: Betha Sarasin, Peter Amrhein, Markus Ganz
2023-2024: Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin, Markus Ganz

Foundation Betha and Teff Sarasin:
Barbara Ganz, Markus Ganz, Ruth Klein Boeijinga, Therese Steffen, Andreas Wenger, Hans-Florian Zeilhofer

Programming:
Benjamin Berger

Sound Integration:
Guillaume Massol 

Consultant of the Foundation:
Armin Blasbichler