Strange Loops

Strange Loops was a triptych created by the Barbican & Prof Marcus du Sautoy to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Douglas Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach as part of the Barbican’s Life Rewired season.

The first part of the triptych (Bach) took place in the concert hall on 9 March 2019. Called The Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter’s subtitle for the book) it explores through the music of Bach and beyond the idea of a Strange Loop. The show was created in collaboration with Designer Ben Kreukniet, composer Robert Thomas and Producer Joana Seguro.

A&E was asked to help create a unique Machine Learning based voting system to allow the audience to participate in the show and also in a composition played live by a string quartet to finish the performance.

The system uses a live 4k camera feed pointed at the audience - this feeds images to a Machine Learning model which looks for custom voting cards given to each audience member, and provides live feedback projected on-screen and also shown to the presenter and performers, to allow the audience to be part of the show.