16 November - early 2021
Casula Powerhouse Performance Space 

An immersive digital sculpture filling Casula Powerhouse’s Performance Space, The Mind at Work is a dancing pulsating chandelier-like structure of spatialised light and sound. It plays out the eddies and bursts of an idling mind, perhaps a mind in isolation, deep in thought or quiet contemplation.

The Mind at Work is a distributed computing system that controls 200 lights and 100 speakers, controlled by 50 small microcomputers that talk to teach other over a network to create a dynamic whole, performing rich massively parallel sound synthesis that creates an immersive sonic space.

Viewing times are limited. Please call reception on 8711 7123 to check availability.

Produced by the Interactive Media Lab, UNSW, with support from the Creativity and Cognition Studios, UTS, Bitscope Designs, Squidsoup and ArtworksRActive.


Photography by Chantel Bann.
The Mind at Work
Software by Oliver Bown, Angelo Fraietta, Augusto Dias Pereira dos Santos.

Original electronic systems by Bitscope Designs.

Designed and built by Oliver Bown, Augusto Dias Pereira dos Santos, Sam Ferguson, Kurt Mikolajczyk and Alex Davies, with Bitscope Designs.

Audio design consultation by Glenn Dickins.

Creative development by Oliver Bown, Augusto Dias Pereira dos Santos, Sam Ferguson, Alex Davies with additional creative work by Squidsoup, Heather Contant, Garth Paine and students at Arizona State University.

Design research by Kurt Mikolajczyk, Linda Candy and Deborah Turnbull Tillman.

Additional support by UNSW A&D Makerspace, Heather Catchpole and UNSW students Waseem Iqbal, Nishant Pandav, Chloe McFarlane, Joanne Chiang and Sarah Wan.

This project is supported by an ARC Linkage grant investigating creative coding.

Photography by Chantel Bann