Klax Vaults by John Brumley & Roy Werner

Klax Vaults was initially conceived as a series of individual simulated planes – totemic walled gardens – each depicting an ecosystem informed by the imagined inner workings of a respective proprietary hardware or software. These black-box systems display sparse and minimally active landscapes, operating in ignorance of each other and the outside world, attempting to articulate some vague caricature of a photo sharing network, an online platform for selling goods, or other like digital realms.
In its current installation at Harvestworks, these autonomous environments merge into one complex, singular system – an invented digital ecology(?) – effectively ‘breaking through the gardens’ walls’ and forcing each to interact & learn to exist synchronously. Imagine a simple hardrive attempting to run a series of programs or commands simultaneously, ultimately confusing itself (misplacing variables, misdirecting outputs) and creating a more taxing and counterintuitive system of feedback loops and recursion.
Through a system of software rendering 8 channels of audio and 3 of video, Klax Vaults immerses its audience in a mutable environment of digital windows looking on digital windows, providing a view into Brumley and Werner’s speculative algorithmic topography. It will run as both an autonomous generative system for the duration of its installation & as a manipulatable interface for live performance during the opening reception.