Trickle Down – A New Vertical Sovereignty

Trickle Down – A New Vertical Sovereignty is a new body of work by UK based artist Helen Knowles – first exhibited at arebyte Gallery, London, 23 Jan – 26 Feb 2020.

“Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty is a tokenised four-screen video installation and generative soundscape attached to the blockchain, which explores value systems and wealth disparity. The artwork is composed of auction scenes, performances and choral interludes by different communities such as prisoners, blockchain technology employees, market sellers, and Sotheby’s auction bidders. Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty draws on technological and financial power structures which traditionally scaffold the disparity between a wealthy elite and everyday working people but looks to re-imagine our vertically stacked digital ecosystem to horizontally distribute wealth. 

The installation commences when a visitor drops a pound coin into a machine designed to expose the mechanisms needed to convert fiat currency into crypto-currency. Each and every member of the Trickle Down community, who has helped the work come to fruition, will receive a share of the ETH via a smart contract on the blockchain.”

The work received an Honorary Mention at this year’s Ars Electronica.

I was part of the development team – along with cross media artist Daniel Dressel and sound designer Pablo Galaz – specifically working on the interaction design. I prescribed and configured the work’s core visual/audio hardware setup and custom-coded the audiovisualisation software that delivered video to each of the four screens and audio to the 8-channel speaker + sub-woofer system when trigged by the coin-drop machine. I also designed, fabricated and coded the four sensors that detected the movement of audiences within the gallery space and fed this data into Pablo’s ambisonic soundscape MaxMSP patch.