Graceful Crystallisation Mathias Gmachl Farmersmanual is a collaborative project of a growing number of individuals from around the world.

We have presented a range of activities from audiovisual laptop concerts and audience driven space based installations to distributed online events with local gateways. We have published music and maintain several websites documenting our work and ongoing research. We create software and ask questions about intellectual property. For us, learning is a continuous process in life and we recognize several ways to achieve insight. Our presentations can involve practicebased research that is open to the public. Let me react strongly to that, Marina. The crazy thing is that I feel like I'm a performance artist too, really. For me also, apart from creating new mathematics, one of the most intense moments is transmitting it to the public---I feel I'm a performer. I love sharing my enthusiasm for ideas with the public. 1 I have been a member of farmersmanual from the onset ten years ago. The following text is a personal account of the ideas and experiences perpetuating the work. The project I am writing about is called BuckyMedia and is part of our research and installation work.

The initial impulse for BuckyMedia came from reaching a point of saturation, which caused a state of disembodiment while keeping my head busy with the computational models that seem to underlie large parts of our modern world today. Behind me was an intense and relentless exploration of digital technology. Like mathematics had been unplugged from its mother, the natural sciences, only a few generations ago, I also got detached from experiencing our natural environment through a human body. I spent my childhood in the abundance of nature, but my education failed to convey the spiritual dimension of the forces around me. Nature was a simple resource and a finite one, similarly the human resource I was to become once equipped with the proper certificate. After spending years with some of my best friends listening to strange new sounds echoing back to us from the digital domain, I heard nature calling me for another chapter of the farmersmanual. As a group farmersmanual has no clear directive; no decision, no corporation. Rather I see it as an experiment about how much energy can be exchanged between systems when their vibrations coincide. I picture us in the ship of fools, endlessly drifting in the stormy weathers of the expansion of human consciousness: farmersmanual present their esoteric exercises in mobile computing and fundamental physics.

In 1902, Lord Kelvin paid a visit to the United States. During his visit, Kelvin proclaimed himself in complete agreement with Nikola Tesla on two controversial issues: 1) that Mars was signaling America and 2) that the conservation of nonrenewable resources was of critical importance to the earth. 2 BuckyMedia is named after Buckminster Fuller, who must have heard Kelvin speak in his dreams as a small boy. Buckys ideas are of such beauty and dynamism because they draw from qualities experienced in our natural environment: efficiency of the highest order. His term Spaceship Earth helped to change peoples perspectives and introduced the concept of sustainability to a wider audience, before we became familiar with satellite images of our planet. With the study of Fuller began a study of geometry, the fundamental language of pattern and spatial relationships. My first experience with geometry was working with a five-meter diameter geodesic sphere. We found a webpage containing Fullers formulas for construction, ordered the materials, had them cut into parts and in a matter of two hours assembled the whole structure. Working on and living around this space had a remarkable affect on the people I was with: it united us as a group and became the center our activities revolved around. Its sum was so much more than its parts; it seemed to greatly expand our notion of what spaces could be. I learned that geometry must be understood through practice and seen and felt in space. The third dimension simulated on a computer is usually viewed flat, which removes us from the essence of spatial thinking. The theoretical and mathematical research into geometry made me aware that, although platonic objects have been with us for several millennia, there is still a lot to discover. The term Quasi-crystal is only 21 years old and describes a spatial pattern based on 5-fold symmetry, which can be observed in natural minerals. This symmetry works so different to our 4-fold/boxstandard solutions that we have so far failed to understand or even apply it. One side effect of such a study is the discovery of how surprisingly regular and harmonic the world of polyhedral geometry is. In my opinion, these pure mathematical laws expose to us once more that the universe is a "planned phenomena". And also reminds us of the fact that polyhedral forms are probably the only cultural forms in the visible universe that every possible extraterrestrial culture will know as the same. These 3D geometrical forms are therefore culturally independent. It would seem that for a first understanding between our world and other universal citizens, polyhedral geometry would be a good issue to present.3 In our current division of subjects geometry is a subset of mathematics, because we calculate to describe its properties. On an evolutionary level, though, geometry comes much before mathematics. It is the three dimensional representation of waveforms self-organizing in a finite space, a principle once described by Goethe as architecture is frozen music. Geometry is a spatial account of the fundamental harmonics our universe is built on, the same harmonics that provide the framework for the exchange of all energies through the principle of resonance. Unlike mathematics, which is a

language we developed to discuss numbers, geometry cannot be created or invented, it can only be discovered. At this point musical and visual aesthetics intersect and point to a common source. Here the distinction between Mozarts use of the G-major scale, Leonardos use of the golden ration and any phylotaxis growth patterns in our gardens disintegrate into one category called beauty. This beauty originates in the secret of life, which we are living examples of and we cannot but resonate to it. Music and sound, therefore, provide a very direct way to communicate and study the most fundamental reality of our existence. Physical laws control what is energetically possible both in nature as well as in society. Thus, in a very direct way, the evolutionary stage of the physical sciences limits the course of history and the cosmic extent of human civilization. 4 Today fundamental research is not only limited by our bias on vision and analytical methodologies, it is also restrained by the powers of corporations, intellectual property laws and environmental and mind pollution. The scientific findings an open debate would confront us with, could have so gigantic implications, it could change power structures forever. Our dependency on fossil fuels must be understood as a deliberate action to preserve that status quo. Unfortunately for us this is the status of one hundred years ago. It reminds me of the music industry lobby trying to turn back time, when confronted with the new distribution possibilities the Internet has given us. But how can we seriously discuss everything from free speech to free software without imagining free energy? The inspiring work of archeoacoustician Paul Devereux is opening our ears towards an acoustic understanding of our past as well as the workings of our own consciousness in response to sound. Thinking about the cosmological, geometrical and acoustic properties of the Mayan-Toltec pyramid temple of Chichen Itza in Mexico, I wonder how many people today work with such a highly integrated vision of our existence: the location of these buildings mark points of high geomagnetical energy while their orientation is aligned to the equinoxes. Their proportions to each other reflect the structure of our solar system and the mathematical formulas, they have become manifestations of, describe the logarithmic self-similarity that structures the universe. On top of all this, a percussive sound made in a certain area to the north of the pyramid results in a curious chirped echo rebounding off the its face that resembles the call of the bird it is dedicated to. The only buildings created in the 20th century, which tried to even consider such connections are the fleeting visions of world exhibition pavilions realized at the end of the 1960ies. One of them is Buckminster Fullers huge geodesic for the show in Montreal and the original World Game he conceived for it. Two others were sponsored by Philips and Pepsi and tried to show off the potentials of art and science collaborations including artists like Iannis Xenakis and Alvin Lucier. Today marketing people have done away with the complicated relationships such projects involve. Endlessly remixing what they believe is the history of art, the creative industries successfully protect corporations from too much original thinking.

Out of all the influences that have reshaped my understanding of the world since I started BuckyMedia, the work of Hartmut Mller had the most profound effect. Mller started researching fundamental physics in the Soviet Union and presented a remarkable paper in 1982, in which he derived the formula of a standing gravitational wave that pervades the entire universe. Knowledge of this standing wave, its equation and solutions solved the most complex problems of stability and allowed scientists for the first time to compare a huge number of physical constants within one frame of reference. This principle of Global Scaling, as Mller calls it, describes an interaction of all particles with each other, simply speaking, something that connects everything to everything else. Very much like a musical scale the theory is based on the idea of harmony, one that is so perfect, it transcends scale. Everything in the universe is a result of this harmonic spectrum and falls back into it. The Cosmic Background Radiation is not the chaotic, undistinguishable noise that established physical science wants us to believe, but the sounding together of everything from the smallest to the largest and from the ultra-weak to the super-stable in the most powerful, astonishing harmony.

Long Distance Running - A conversation between Marina Abramovic, Gregory Chaitin and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Chigusa Hotel, Kitakyushu, July 2001 http://www.btgjapan.org/cc_01.html
2

Prof. Pickering, Harvard Observatory, Jan 16, 1901, New York Times- and Philadelphia North American, May 18, 1902. 'Lord Kelvin believes ET now signalling America.' http://www.dcca.nl/art/tesla1-uk.htm
3

Einar Thorsteinn, "to the habitants of space in general and the spatial inhabitants in particular", Band 2, BAWAG FOUNDATION Edition, Vienna
4

Hartmut Mller, Free Energy Global Scaling, Global Scaling Special 1, Ehlers Verlag GmbH, Wolfratshausen

Text for the piece of the CD farmersmanual - Parallel Our third presentation of BuckyMedia involved the public on as many levels as possible. The geodesic sphere was equipped with a wireless sound system and digital sensors. It was at the same time musical instrument and concert hall. We provided geometry toolkits and documentation of our past presentations and tried to give access to all the information we had put together so far. The project resonated through the entire museum, its curators, technical staff and attendants, inducing its own frequencies into the people, gallery spaces and technical

infrastructure around it. The sphere worked like a liquid crystal, reconfiguring the flow of energy in its environment. The stunning changes of daylight in the gallery space provided an atmosphere of high-altitude, lucid dreaming, while the sonified gravitational data of the structure added a narrow band of digital squeals and screams to the deep vibrations of the shrink-wrap window drums. For more documentation on the project, please visit http://web.fm Mathias Gmachl biography Mathias Gmachl is working as an artist, musician and researcher. He is a founding member of farmersmanual, a pan-European, multisensory disturbance conglomerate that presented a stream of constructions since 1995, continuously expanding their practice from music concerts to interdisciplinary cultural, aesthetic and political experiments. Opposed to companies shifting the balance of fundamental rights and liberties he is using alternative collaborative structures based on sharing information, skills and resources among the partners. Venues, festivals and museums Mathias presented include: Ars Electronica (1997, 1999), Sonar Festival Barcelona (1998, 1999, 2002), Montreal Festival for Film and New Media (1999, 2001), Centre Georges Pompidou (2000), What is Music? Festival Sydney (2001, 2002), The Venice Biennale (2001), Avanto Festival Helsinki (2000, 2001), Kunsthalle Schirn Frankfurt (2002). Mathias is currently developing a sound research program together with Jon Wozencroft and Len Massey at the Royal College of Art. If you wish to contact him please mail to: hiaz@live.fm