Music artwork inspired by Charles Babbage’s first computer

With Aphex Twin’s latest release available as a £250 Perspex vinyl limited-edition (covered over on Creative Review here), and a recent exhibition celebrating collector’s edition releases such as The Flaming Lips’ gummy skull-encased  four track EP on USB, it seems there’s never been a better time to marry music and visual art.

Now one of the most active purveyor’s of this crossover, The Vinyl Factory, is making things even bigger, with a new installation work by artist Conrad Shawcross.

Entitled The ADA Project, the piece takes the form of a 20-day series of events centred around a hacked robot that has been programmed to enact four different choreographed “dances”.

Each dance responds to a piece of music created by a different musician, with Dillon & Clervaux, Mira Calix, Tamara Barnett Herrin and Mylo each creating a piece.

These compositions are being pressed by The Vinyl Factory as one of four limited edition laser etched 12” vinyl records, each accompanied by one of four artist’s prints, hand signed and numbered by Shawcross. The singles alone will also be available as a larger edition.

The Vinyl Factory says: “Conrad Shawcross takes a new approach to commissioning music, reversing the traditional process, so that the robot’s dance provides the inspiration and parameters for the music.”

The project has been inspired by Lord Byron’s mathematician daughter Ada Lovelace ,who worked with Charles Babbage to create what The Vinyl Factory calls “the first proto-computer”. This  counting machine, said Lovelace, “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent” , making it a 19^th century direct ancestor of today’s music programming software. 

The musicians involved in the project referenced this early invention in each of their pieces, working closely with Shawcross to study how his robot responded to the musical patterns they created, which are based on the ratios and drawings for the never-realised Babbage computer.

The ADA project is in place from 11 – 31 October at The Vinyl Factory Space at Brewer Street Car Park, which you can access from 17 Peter Street W1F 0AL