Dave makes works that negotiate the spaces between people and technology. They explore notions of sociality, responsiveness and response-ability, interfaces and agency, often working with distributed systems, audio processing and digital electronics to build new windows into space and time. His pieces work partly as research vehicles, using interaction as a way to articulate the new relationalities possible with increasingly animate technology. Lichtsuchende was awarded the 2019 Lumen Prize (BCS Award for AI and Art) and has been shown at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the New Technology Art Awards and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Other works have been shown at Tate Exchange, Kinetica, Talbot Rice Gallery and more.

‘artificial otoacoustics’ is an investigation into a physical deep learning synthesiser that comes to understand itself and its surrounding, exploring how a machine learning system with an unconventional soundmaking apparatus learns to produce sounds, and to use them in dialogue with humans.

The body of the piece is a light based synthesiser: spinning prisms, rotating mirrors and other objects refract a set of lights into phototransistors that creates evolving, grainy, organic electronic sounds. Around this, a deep learning system takes control of the input parameters: the speed of motors, intensity of lights, positions of actuators and so on. It continually samples the output, slowly learning the ways that it’s parameters of action shape the sounds coming out. Over time, by making many many sounds, the system learns both what sounds a set of parameters is likely to make, and also the best set of parameters to reproduce a sound from outside, opening up a terrain for sonic interaction.

The residency program of iii is supported financially by the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Creative Europe program of the European Union.