Research question

Does this relation to the vessel — presence through acoustic attunement, alongside observation through visual dashboards — support different capacities: sustained awareness without fatigue, pattern recognition through embodied familiarity, sensitivity to change through dwelling in a soundscape over time?

Three ideas

Presence through sound

Remote monitoring places operators as observers of screens. Here an operator enters an acoustic environment and shapes it until the vessel's rhythms become legible. This crafting is attunement.

The AI inflects; it does not alert

The AI speaks through the soundscape: a stream brightens, moves forward in the mix, or gains texture. Three moves: brighten, sympathetic pull, return.

Visual noise as resource

Remote interfaces cancel boat motion, engine vibration, sea clutter and horizon drift to spare the operator. That erased data carries information; OpenWaves sonifies it.

Extends OpenBridge

OpenBridge is an open-source design system for industrial and maritime interfaces, developed since 2017 by the OICL consortium of 45 partners. It sets visual standards for safe, efficient operations. OpenWaves adds the auditory dimension: acoustic design guidelines beside the visual standards, multimodal alert hierarchies, and joint evaluation. This site is built from OpenBridge's own web components.

On this site

Where the same box ran

On the table

Hands

Intech Studio Grid (EF44 · TEK2 · VSN1 · PBF4), 34 learned addresses: faders are stream weights, encoders each stream's character, two jog wheels the vessel and world masters

Body

TAO: NVIDIA GB10, 128 GB unified memory, 1.48 kg, open-weights models only, no cloud in the room

Streams

Engine · Wind · Sonar · Alarms (the vessel half) · Vessels · Radio · Humans · Marine (the world half)

Boats

Fifteen, each with its own world and recorded loops; a change of boat crossfades over two seconds

Sound

Recorded loops mixed by the operator's gestures; alarms as exact one-shots, never generated. The generative layer (Magenta RealTime 2) was held back from the table

AI

Three moves on the stand's rules: brighten, sympathetic pull, return

Screen

The OpenBridge front end, playable by touch when no Grid is on the table

The evening in numbers

From the instrument's own record: its sound, taken from the sound card's playback (no room microphone), and its state ledger, one line per second. The visitors' voices are not here.

Aim

What AI infrastructure do artists and cultural institutions actually need to work critically, experimentally and sustainably, when the compute that shapes cultural production is owned and governed elsewhere? And where is the line between analysis and confabulation in a machine that runs continuously, accumulates context over months — and reads people?

Methods

Artistic research by building and operating. TAO is a persistent instrument on one self-hosted box running open-weights models only: a 27B language model, two ears, an embedding model, a model that hears and sees, music (Magenta RealTime 2) and sound (Stable Audio 3). Two prototypes exercise it — Open Ambient (acoustic telepresence for maritime operations, with OICL) and Warp (latent audio space as live material) — and two field experiments, NE #00 and NE #01, run the mechanics of a model on a room of people: encoding, embedding, forward propagation, with consent as the first component.

Results

NE #00, Ars Electronica, 9 Sep: 24 people, no internet, one box; 22 encodings mapped into five groups with a stated reason each; 1,501 relations on the wall; the room amended the machine's ledger. NE #01, Kristiansand: 274 registered participants read from the public web in one night and gated for wrong-person risk — most came back thin, and that is the finding; ten statements; a hundred people placed where they stand by what they said, told why afterwards. Measured on the way: a hotspot that seats 14 phones; unified memory where a second model kills the first; a room that needs 1.5-second service no cluster provides.

Value

An instrument as research object and infrastructure for multimodal creative inquiries. OpenWaves is the instrument's maritime limb: the same box that seats a room of a hundred people on Monday morning plays the ship on Monday night — infrastructure small institutions can own, built for a purpose rather than for scale.

Four bodies of one idea

v1 · Jan 2026

On the desk. A Logitech MX controller and a laptop; Ableton Live, mock telemetry, OSC.

v2 · 19 Mar 2026

OICL seminar, 27 industry participants. The Intech Grid and four bridge screens; the eight-stream mixer in Web MIDI and Web Audio.

OpenWaves · 14 Sep 2026

MishMash LIVE, Kraftverk. The same Grid and TAO; 24 loops per vessel, the OpenBridge front end, a generative layer measured on the box.

The stage · 13 Oct 2026

Black Box, Helsinki Music Centre. TAO and eight simulated bodies; TAO hears the room and moves the world's knobs.

In the field, 2025

The first TAO was autonomous listening infrastructure in exposed places — Lanzarote in November 2025, Nezabudice in December — with methods for acoustic capture in wind, power-constrained transmission and operation without maintenance. Those methods carry to vessel-mounted microphones.

Continuous streaming at 4.45 W could not balance on solar. A 19-minute acquisition / 1-minute transmission duty cycle keeps the modem active 5 % of the time.

Latency as gravity

The limits of computation and networking don't just affect performance; they shape what becomes perceptually salient in remote sensing, and in what order. Audio arrives first and becomes the continuous ground truth; video follows as a secondary, discontinuous layer.

We hear the planet before we see it.

Recordings

From the TAO report, captured with sensiBel AURORA MEMS microphones.

The anthropomorphized form

TAO V2 consciously places itself in a lineage of anthropomorphized listening technologies. Like the Neumann KU 100 "Fritz", its sensiBel AURORA microphones inside furry windscreens make a ritualized head-form — a modern interpretation of binaural recording.

TAO sits at the intersection of scientific instrument, autonomous agent and ritual object, channeling environmental acoustics into networked presence.

Partners

Resources