2.UMWELTNOISE

UMWELTNOISE is a real-time audiovisual system that borrows the behavioral logic of slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, as an approach to machine vision. The organism has no brain, yet it solves spatial problems by laying down and following chemical trails, and the piece treats that trail-making as a form of data-visualization.

The title points to Jakob von Uexkull's idea of the umwelt, the self-centered world an organism builds from only what it can perceive. The work asks what a system's umwelt looks and sounds like when its senses are reduced to attraction and decay.

Accompanied by an academic paper in ACM format.

Despite the successful adaptation of an unconventional visual construction method, the approach remained constrained by human-authored audio compositions and the built-in analysis tools available within TouchDesigner. This raised a fundamental question about the project's alignment with the goals of UMWELTNOISE: if the audio interpretation layer is still structured by human-made tools and human compositional logic, the resulting visualization may not differ meaningfully from conventional audiovisualization in its underlying epistemology. It became clear that a closer alignment with the project's intent would require developing a new approach to audio interpretation itself, not only to its visual representation.