Andy Cavatorta Studio | Future Projects
Thinking in Algorithms | A coffee table book
Algorithms are all around us. They are a way of seeing the world and a way of guiding the unruly details into predictable outcomes.
This beautifully designed coffee table book teaches readers to see problems and possibilities through the lens of algorithms. This knowledge provides new mental tools to perceive more, imagine more, and solve more. The book features moveable parts, innovative illustrations, special cards & dominoes, and many exercises and games through which readers experience algorithms from within.
Topics include conditionals, loops, data & memory, time complexity, space complexity, graph theory basics, sorting algorithims, card games as algorithms, traffic as altorithms, social algorithms, and more.
Readers will come to understand the concepts behind dozens of algorithms in the world around us — and also the fine details needed to compute them with pencil and paper.
Two companion books are also planned: Thinking in Equations and Thinking in Circuits & Systems.
The Mark IV Telharmonium | A resurrection and revision
The world’s first electronic streaming music service played only electronic music from the world’s first synthesizer. It launched in 1906 and had thousands of subscribers in New York City. The primordial synthesizer was the size of a power plant and generated 1.5 million watts of articulate musical electricity. Its signals permeated the whole city through thousands of wires in the early telephone network.
This was the birth of streaming music, the most popular listening method over a century later. And also of electronic music. Much of 20th Century music was shaped by what Cahill's ideas made possible.
Witnesses gushed hyperbolically about the Telharmonium's sounds. Mark Twain said that he had to postpone his impending death so he could listen to it longer. But no recordings of the Telharmonium exist. No living human has heard its music. And if a single bolt or wire still drifts on the world’s heaving seas of technological flotsam, its history remains a secret.
The only evidence left behind is breathless descriptions, a few photos, and gorgeously detailed patents describing the inventor’s discoveries and ideas. The final patents describe the Mark III Telharmonium, which Cahill never got to bring to fruition. Thaddeus Cahill died in 1934, leaving behind only his ideas.
But this story isn't over yet. Like a musical version of Jurassic Park, we can resurrect this musical leviathan. The Mark IV will be Andy Cavatorta’s highly sculptural collaboration with Thaddeus Cahill, across a century.
All of the ideas that gave the Telharmonium its unique sound and musical identity will be included. The massive iron dynamos, exotic keyboards, singing-arc speakers, and ingenious wave-shaping techniques.
But other parts will use the latest technologies, materials, and engineering processes. Precise motion control systems. CAD instead of pencil sketches. Robots instead of child labor. It will also implement ideas that Cahill wrote about but never got to implement. Ideas that might have gone into his own Mark IV.
Even with the patents and these clear goals, much is still open to interpretation. Cahill's final Telharmonium differed from his patents in ways that we cannot now know. Into these blank spaces, Andy will add his own interpretations — including a new form that shows the mechanisms in all of their beauty.
The Mark IV will be unveiled in a series of performances in which electronic musicians and their ensembles will discover and perform new compositions and interpretations, fully exploring the lost possibilities and inventing new ones.
Feral & True | A miniseries about the adventure of making impossible things
Feral & Pure is a raw and intimate serial documentary about a team of scrappy Brooklyn-based artists and inventors .
Andy, Marina, and Yvette take everyone along on umpredictable adventures as they invent impossible things, explore frontiers, and explain science and technology in creative and entertaining ways.
It’s also a lens through which to introduce a world of visionary weekly guests working at the forefront of art, music, and technology.
