Useless Box: A Sonic Automaton Integrating Robotics, Sound Art, and Performance

• Panayiotis Kokoras University of North Texas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbcm_estendido.2025.14227

Resumo

Useless Box is a transdisciplinary performance work at the intersection of robotics, sound art, and interactive composition. Inspired by the myth of Pandora’s Box and Schrödinger’s cat, this piece utilizes an autonomous wooden box equipped with physical computing, sensors, and actuators, all controlled by a MaxMSP-based system with machine listening and AI capabilities. Through the integration of sound design, theatricality, and algorithmic processes, Useless Box explores questions of agency, unpredictability, and performativity. The box, which initially appears empty and inert, unfolds into an unpredictable sonic and kinetic world—oscillating between reality and fantasy, mechanical and organic, the playful and the ominous. The work challenges conventional notions of instrumentality, composition, and performer/audience relationships by blurring the boundaries between object and subject, chaos and order, and the real and the imagined.

Palavras-chave: physical computing, sound art, robotics, MaxMSP, interactive composition, machine listening, performance, transdisciplinary

Referências

P. Kokoras. Useless Box: Program Notes. 2023–2024.

C. Roads. Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic. Oxford University Press, 2015.

T. Wishart. On Sonic Art. Routledge, 1996.

S. Emmerson. Living Electronic Music. Ashgate, 2007.