Created by Agoston Nagy, Atlås is an ‘anti game environment’ that generates music in a conversational cognitive space. The app includes automatically generated tasks that are solved by machine intelligence without the need of human input. Agoston questions ad infinitum (ability to continue forever), presence, human cognition, imagination, and more broadly corporate driven automatisms and advanced listening practices.

“One component of the experiment is to introduce a narrative that is guiding through the listener through the whole experience. Chance operations are involved in this process: semi randomly selected questions are asked by the late 20th century composer John Cage. In fact, those questions are focusing on communication between humans, the environment and cognitive processes. As with the case of his music and legacy, the project concentrates on marginalized aspects of presence, amplifying the background and non intended cognitive processes to succeed in the composition. By applying this thinking into a downloadable app, mediated alienation of our networked society gains attention through a semi-ironic tautologist chat-bot philosophy context.” – Agoston Nagy

The project is developed with free and open source tools with an educational aspect in mind. The main application is written in javascript, using the p5js library that is embedded into a regular Swift iOS application. This example template can be used to write and play with your own app using p5js within an iOS app. The sound synthesis is written in Pure Data, that is a useful graphical programming language to develop interactive sonic events. It can be integrated into all type of projects and applications using LibPd. This example template can be used to write and play with your own app using libPd within an iOS app.

Atlås is available in the AppStore for $1.99 from October 20th, 2017.

AppStore | Project Page | Agoston Nagy