This robotic installation with responsive projection is as much an apparatus of art as it is a tool for music and an instrument of psychology and physics. Tautophone is a reference to the projective “auditory Rorschach” tests developed by psychologists Skinner, Rosenzweig, and Shakow in the 1930s and 1940s, while Curious here refers to the robot's motivation to explore its surroundings and to learn. Reflecting the human capability to feel attachment to inanimate objects, the Curious Tautophone's role is to recalibrate the cognitive tissue that binds man and machine. 

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In 1944 two psychologists Heider and Simmel revealed in their seminal experiment, that humans have a pronounced tendency to impose narrative meaning even in the presence of simple animations of geometric shapes, so the human have capability to feel attachment to inanimate objects. 
The name Tautophone derives from projective auditory tests developed by psychologists Skinner, Rosenzweig and Shakow that can be understood as a form of Auditory Rorschach Inkblot where a sequence of vowels was repeated in an attempt to trigger latent speech hidden in the listener’s psyche. The curious aspect of the name induces a sense of the Tautophone’s motivation to explore its surroundings and to learn.  

Tensor fields express the mathematical representation of the visual environment creating a different kind of adapting and continually changing set of inkblots of light. Using the physical phenomena of directional sound using ultrasound waves at high acoustic pressure levels as a medium of robotic expression, the unusual, even uncanny nature of hearing these auditory hallucinations opens the observer's perceptual engine and intensifies the multitude of subliminal stimuli. 

Finally Curious Tautophone – Tensor Field Ontology deals with the basic structures that are connecting reality and possibility, the role of the robot being to recalibrate the cognitive tissue that binds man and machine. 

A field of light moving simultaneously with a beam of sound, both emanated from one source, a shiny metal tripod robot that is spinning a speaker around two axes. Like a swirl of sound and light the visitor is drawn into the piece with all his senses and finds himself enveloped in a transforming spatial sound sculpture.  

A moment of precious intimacy is created and a door between the subconsciousness of the visitor and the robotic machine is opened, both aurally and visually. The decidedly non-anthropomorphic robot is the source of this transcendent atmosphere and shows that the Curious Tautophone is as much an apparatus of art as it is a tool for music and an instrument for psychology and physics. 

You can find more information about the authors on the web: https://hochschuh-donovan.com/ 

FB EVENT: HERE

TEXT: PDF under the photos

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Katrin Hochschuh & Adam Donovan 

CURIOUS TAUTOPHONE – TENSOR FIELD ONTOLOGY  

16 May –29 June 2025 

Opening: 15 May 2025, 5 PM 

Curator: Ondřej Merta 

Photoreport: Tatiana Drgonec Dižová

Photo credits: Hochschuh & Donovan / artists