The river

Skellefteälven has seen everything: the ice age, the first settlers, the mines, the power plants, the new industries. So we let the river tell the story.

It meets you in the dark at the very start. Curious. Unstoppable. Creative. Reach out, and the water moves around your hand.

1. A Kinect reads the people in front of the wall.
2. The water is generated in real time and projected across 15 metres of corridor wall.
3. Sound comes from Ableton Live: an ambient mix for room 1, with no beat, across four speakers in surround. It never plays the same way twice.
4. Sensors in the corridor fire notes and samples into the mix over MQTT, through a small Python bridge that turns messages into MIDI.

• A Python bridge (paho-mqtt, python-rtmidi, python-osc) on a Mac mini feeds Ableton through the IAC driver, and passes Ableton’s OSC on to TouchDesigner.
• It also reads Ableton’s clock and publishes the tempo once per bar, so lights elsewhere can follow the music.
• The curator turns room 1 and room 2 up and down from an eight-knob MIDI controller. Knob 1 is “energy” for every light and sound in the exhibition.
• Ableton boots without dialogs: the setup clears crash-recovery prompts and reopens the project on its own every morning.