Blanziflor et Helena / My Brain Is a Wunderkammer
interactive audiovisual installation, 2024
first presented at ArtPiknik Cered, 2024
Our brain is an ever-present personal chamber of curiosities, which, seemingly at random, throws at us surprising fragments of the past, mixed in with our more recent experiences, only to let this chaotic mixture sometimes unfold into unexpectedly inspiring combinations. Decomposing and transforming images and sounds emerge, and visitors can add their own audio memories to the swirling content of this virtual brain.
HoME-Corner
interactive multimedia installation, 2022
concept: Bálint Bolcsó, Franciska Éry, Ábris Gryllus
sound programming and interaction design: Bálint Bolcsó
light design: Ábris Gryllus
first presented at HoME Exhibition @ Mixtur Festival
You read a sentence into the microphone. Fragments of many interviews about the topic ‘home’ with people across Hungary get gradually combined into collectively reconstructed echoes of your sentence.
Fox Dance
interactive audiovisual installation, 2021
text: Kinga Tóth
first presented at ArtPiknik Cered 2021
The fox won’t come if we don’t call her. But if we find a way to talk to her, she might even respond.
The intensity of the visitors’ utterances directly influence the density of the visual material, a real-time generated montage of footage about foxes visiting the ArtColony during the nights.
Different Spaces
sound installation, 2021
first presented at Térviszony
Augmented headphones, private listening space.
Different sounding spaces. Spaces found, stolen, recorded, imitated, reconstructed, synthesized, emptied, layered, resized. Spaces past, unusual, imagined, dreamed, expanded, projected, longed for, tired, used to, never heard of. Real and virtual sound spaces where nothing happens.
Thanks to János Bali for his help in the technical realisation.
Swing for Two, Somewhere
interactive sound installation, 2020
first presented at Hangfarm 2020
Added sound functionality to an existing swing. Quiet at rest, the speed of the two seats (i.e. the intensity of the swinging) determines the volume of each part of a two-voice musical piece. If two people sway at the same time, a variety of combinations can be experimented with. The musical material is a synthetic-organic recreation of a romantic duet. Detailed description (in Hungarian) here.
L/EGO
interactive sound installation, 2019
first presented at A Hold fogat mos
“When I was four years old, I told a long story from memory and it was recorded on tape. At the time I really liked building things out of Lego. When I was 40, I built a gadget covered in Lego, which constantly generates new, mostly nonsensical, stories from the ominous audio recording. By touching the coins individually or simultaneously, anyone can try to disturb it.”
In the headphones, a child’s voice is telling a story (Babar and Santa Claus). By touching one or both coins, one can influence what is played alongside/instead of the child’s voice: a melody that follows the declaim of the speech, or a percussive texture that follows the rhythm of the speech, or both. The story told by the child’s voice is thus accompanied by organic music.
Zoo, Landscapes, Cosmos
interactive sound installation, 2018
built for Gábor Palotai’s exhibition at Trafó Galéria
first presented at Zoo, Landscapes, Cosmos – Finisszázs
Visitors can scan the pictures of the artist, arranged in a long strip, by flashlight. The experience of visual discovery is accompanied by artificial soundscapes inspired by the images, the composition of which varies according to the position of the light.
Cenușar
sound installation, 2018
concept: Dénes Miklósi, Bálint Bolcsó
images: Minerva Press Photo Archive, Dénes Miklósi
sound design, audio programming: Bálint Bolcsó
first presented at Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
This work is based on semi-automatic sequential analysis and sonification of more than 30000 photos from the Minerva archive. The histogram (distribution of brightness) of each image is converted to a wavetable and used as the basis of the timbre. Other features of this brightness data (mean value, peak location) are responsible for some other sonic aspects such as pitch and stereo placement. The resulting sound material was further refined through some intuitively controlled parameters and processing. While scanning through this more than 20 years worth of images, various bell sounds indicate each change of year or timespan. The result is a sonic journey that somewhat resembles the temporal distributon of the collection and derives from the actual visual content, while creating a musical narrative that can stand on its own.
Tangential connections
interactive sound installation, 2017
first presented at BÚRA
There are six squeezed soda cans on the wall. When someone touches one of them, music plays for the duration of the touch. Touching different cans at the same time produces different music, adding new layers, transformations to the original material. Exploring all the possibilities requires the cooperation of several visitors. The more boxes are touched at once, the more interesting the sound stream becomes.
Let’s Throw Things at Contemporary Music!
interactive sound installation, 2017
concept and content: Bálint Bolcsó, Lőrinc Muntag, Anna Peternák, Ernő Zoltán Rubik, Ferenc János Szabó, Máté Szigeti, Zsuzsa Dóry Tornyai
realisation: Bálint Bolcsó
first presented at BÚRA
The bowl is playing calm contemporary music. If you don’t like it, you can throw various small object at it, upon which it will react with different sonic behaviours, depending on its mood.
Sound exhibition
interactive sound installation, 2011
first presented at Researchers’ Night, Európa Pont
Visitors can create complex musical structures using everyday objects and their own voices. Random algorithms and real-time internet sources are involved in making the resulting sonic material unique and unrepeatable.
Plush Zoo
interactive sound installation, 2010
first presented at MusikTriennale Köln, 2010
Interactive sound installation for four stuffed animals and the same number of speakers. The stuffed animals sitting on a carpet are surrounded by a quiet natural atmosphere – until someone starts playing with them. The intensity of each animal’s movement generates a complex ‘nature-like’ sound environment specific for its species.
Ruhezone
sound installation, 2009
first presented at Musik21 Festival Hannover, 2009
As part of Musik 21 Festival, site-specific sound installations were created in different parts of the Herrenhäuser Gärten, a large baroque garden in Hanover. I designated a fenced-off, less-manicured mini-garden as a sound-enhanced resting place, hiding tiny speakers everywhere. I used heavily transformed excerpts of baroque music disguised as nature sounds to seemlessly augment the existing soundscape of the park.
