A bachelor’s thesis by Henning Marxen (@henning_marxen) Supervised by Prof. Pablo Dornhege and Prof. Alexander Müller-Rakow
The CR.O.M.A. is an interactive audiovisual machine that explores the boundaries and interconnections between analog and digital media. It starts from the observation that these two concepts are often seen as opposites, as “old” and “new” media. In the post-digital age, however, this separation is becoming increasingly porous. Digitality has lost its sense of novelty. Instead, hybridity, interconnectedness, and translation moves into the foreground.
The machine combines mechanical, electronic, and virtual elements that are interconnected. An analog Super 8 film projector, a mechanical data plotter, generated sounds, an internal visual feedback loop, and a CRT monitor. All modules exchange data streams, translate them into image, sound, or movement, and return them in an altered form.
Data Plotter – Continuously records the data stream from the selected source as a graph, transforming the immaterial digital data into a physically tangible medium.
8mm Projection – Two manually inscribed sequencers on the film strip (binary on the left, analog on the right), containing the notes of “Daisy Bell,” provide the fundamental data for the entire apparatus. For example, the projection speed influences significants functions of the machine.
Use the machine! Everyone is invited to actively engage with it through switches, knobs, and levers. What emerges is less a clearly controllable instrument and more a system that unfolds in its own way and remains only partially controllable.
The CR.O.M.A. is at once an object, an instrument, and a visualization of theoretical inquiry. It points to the materiality of analog media, the abstraction of digital data, and the productive tensions that arise between the two. The goal is not to provide answers, but to create an experience, making the hybridity of media and post-digital cultures sensually tangible through direct interaction with them.
Two of the three visual displays on the CRT monitor feature a user interface. The third shows a live feed of the analog projection.
