As 2017 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular peformances, large scale installations, devices and tools to the new virtual spaces for artistic exploration – so many great projects are being added to the CAN archive! Here are a just few, 25 in total, that we and you enjoyed the most this year.

“Three Pieces with Titles” is the latest audiovisual performance by Montreal’s artificiel. In it Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy manipulate an eclectic collection of objects within the field of view of a computer vision system to generate real-time video and abstract sonic collage.

‘Déguster l’augmenté’ is a collaborative project by Erika Marthins with ECAL (Bachelor Media & Interaction Design) that questions if food could be augmented and technology provide a new dimension to how we experience a meal.

Created by Andy Wallace & Dan Friel, Bleep Space is a free sequencer toy that uses stark geometry to allow users to create noisy beats by assembling 15 sounds accompanied by motion graphics and procedural animations.

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.

Dan Tapper is a British artist based in Toronto that combines his interest in code and celestial form and his recent research project “Turbulent Forms” visualizes and sonifies various cosmic phenomena. To mark the recent exhibition of this work (and related collaborations with several composers) we present this extended conversation with the artist about cosmology and data aesthetics.

Created by David Colombini, The Weather Followers is a commentary on ‘smart’ applications and predictive, comfortable digital routines. Instead of relying on ‘accurate’ data, intangible algorithms and hidden lines of code-driven lifestyles, this device brings serendipity to your digital life, using constantly evolving weather data recorded by four weather instruments.

Created for and in collaboration with an electronic music band Niagra, Roger Water is a web based interactive 360 VR and live A/V experience by Stefano Maccarelli. The project is an a endless immersive exploration of a generative, infinite open world, set in a surreal Earth-like world, of a parallel universe connected to ours, populated by objects from modern terrestrial civilisation and terrestrial creatures that behave in unusual ways.

Created by Benedict Hubener, Stephanie Lee and Kelvyn Marte at the CIID with the help from Andreas Refsgaard and Gene Kogan, ‘The Classyfier’ is a table that detects the beverages people consume around it and chooses music that fits the situation accordingly.

Latest in the series of self-initiated studies by Simon Russell exploring the combination of the audio and visual, ‘The Creatures of Prometheus’  is a generative visualisation of the ballet composed in 1801 by Beethoven.

Created by EJTECH (Esteban de la Torre and Judit Eszter Kárpáti), Soft Sound is practice-led research that combines textiles with sound to explore possibilities for encountering, enhancing and exploring multi-sensory experiences. The project explores the relationship between textile and sound, focusing on the idea of using textile as an audio emitting surface.

Created by NY based art and architecture collective Softlab, ‘Volume’ is an interactive cube of responsive mirrors that redirect light and sound to spatialize and reflect the excitement of surrounding festival goers.

AUDINT is a European artist collective working across animation, installation, and publishing. Drawing on excerpts from an extended conversation with the group, we unpack their vision of the dystopian future-present and the nether zones that can be conjured through sound and vibration.

Created by Belarusian composer Ales Tsurko, ‘microscale’ is a music album generated from random Wikipedia articles where letters are the sequencer steps and the track titles are regular expressions that switch the steps on and off.

Created by London-based musical duo the Network Ensemble, Selected Network Studies is a series of audiovisual pieces created using network data collected from a number of locations across London, Berlin and Rome. It is released as limited edition UV-printed, vacuum-sealed mylar package containing a 2GB SD Card with one hour of video material and 45 minutes of sound material.

Created by Technical Earth (Mo H. Zareei + Jim Murphy), interference [dac] is an audiovisual installation that explores the combination and interaction of waveforms in one medium with those of another. In the installation, which includes a linear array of four miniature projectors  affixed to loudspeaker cones, sound waves affect light waves while analogue elements alter digital ones.

Created by the Responsive Environments team at the MIT Media Lab, the ‘FabricKeyboard’ explores the concept of stretchable fabric “sensate media” as a musical instrument. The work is a response to the current developments of textile sensors, stretchable nature of knitted fabrics, and vast growth of new digital music instruments.

Created by Martin Backes, ‘I am sitting in a machine’ is a two part work algorithmic work consisting of a dubplate vinyl and a webpage containing 32 tracks selected from 3000 successive iterations of MP3 encoding.

Created by St. Petersburg artist collective VOLNA, Powerline is an audio reactive installation comprised of 220 meters of electroluminescent wire driven by 15 meter “voltaic arc” filling the space with electric buzz and sparks.

Created by Yuri Suzuki Design Studio and presented at the recent Milan Design Week, Sonic Pendulum is a sound installation in which articial intelligence imagines and materialises an endless soundscape.

PSAD Synthetic Desert III is a (semi) anechoic chamber that endeavors to emulate the silence and emptiness of the Northern Arizona desert. Initially conceived by the American artist Doug Wheeler in 1968, the project was finally realized at NYC’s Guggenheim last week as part of the Panza Collection Initiative.

The dadamachines automat toolkit enables you to tap, move and bang to make sound with the world around you. It is hackable & open-source and now looking for support on Kickstarter.

Created by Matteo Crivella, Markov Decisions is a generative audio system that combines random processes and sonic behaviours of matter. Data is created in Pure Data that drives the instrument through voice coil actuators putting the sheet of brass under stress and generating a tensional field in which the metal changes from one vibrating state to another, in relations to the input and its physical properties (mass, elasticity, morphology).

What if tweaking rhythm and melodic loops was like editing DNA? This is the question at the heart of Seaquence, a new iOS app by Okaynokay where you populate a Petri dish with ‘creatures’ that visually represent their sonic properties. A bold step away from conventional interface paradigms, it blends notions of tool, instrument, and game into something new and distinct.

Created by the visual artist Palmer Eldritch aka Denial of Service, “Onryō” is the latest in the series of audio/video releases that combines tech-noir chaos with reaction-diffusion sequences created in Max/Jitter, courtesy of Paul Fennell.

Just discovered: a presentation by Instrument builder and sound artist Derek Holzer, in which he catalogues the history of optical synthesis. It is worth a look as it cites a number of fairly obscure (and fascinating) precedents of interest to anyone working in audiovisual design.

Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony is a recent installation by Lille-based artist Mathilde Lavenne that forgoes (burial and cremation) funerary convention in favour of sonification.

The Mylar Topology is a new audiovisual performance by the London-based artist Paul Prudence. In it liquid forms ripple along with binaural beats, forming vertebral columns and congealing oil slicks – which dissipate as quickly as they form.

In the final week of the last year’s fall 10-week program at the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), students presented their work in progress and its underly ideas in a public showcase. Here is a selection of projects that were presented.

Created by Simon Russell, animation director based in London, the following is a series of Houdini experiments where geometry is used as a way to visualise sound, and vice versa.