Installations

Audio and audio-visual installations since 1997. 


Western Electric (2012)


Western Electric is a composition for an array of computer-controlled rotary telephones. Using swarm intelligence and small-world network algorithms, Ostrowski transforms the phones into a flock of obsolete instruments with an atavistic sentience: Not the advanced consciousness of communication devices as we fantasize them, but a primitive will whose intentions are utterly alien to us, expressed in a language of peals and clicks. The Host aims to unfold the formal object of the telephone by reshaping its familiar sonic and social relations, reconsidering it as orchestra, bedlam, hive, and site of exchange.



Scarlet(t) (2011)


Scarlet(t) is a systems-based attempt to isolate the 'latent' content of a popular film. Using a tracking algorithm, the middlebrow  romance "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is reduced to its most crucial token – Scarlett Johanssen's scarlet lips.  Extracting this one signifier, Scarlett's famous mouth, wrenches the true subject of the movie – her lips, and their erotic juxtapositions – out of the extravagant context of costume drama in which it is cushioned. The entire film, both sonically and visually, is thus in some way squeezed through it's primary feature, the point to which our eyes are drawn: the inaccessible eroticism of the star.


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Spectral City (2007)


Spectral City is an audio installation designed for a public space.  Every city has a chord underlying it, inaudible to us beneath the short-term activity of daily life: this installation listens to its surroundings, extracts and amplifies this chord, and plays it back.  This secret sound is permeating us unconsciously every day. The intent of this piece is to bring it to the fore, revealing the hidden sonic architecture of the city.



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Send me a Sign (2005)

Mixed-media installation with Andrea Parkins, Francesco Guiana, and Julija Naskova, realized at CESTA International festival, Tabor, Czech Republic, August 2005.


atopia:levigation and apophenia (2005-08)

Audio/video installation for live internet feed, converting all data received from a webcrawler directly into audio while displaying the content currently being sonified. Premiered at Dorkbot Zürich, 2005.