“The Blancmange” was an interactive sound sculpture developed for my performance project, “Protoplasm”. It had to have a decidedly B-Movie Sci Fi look to be in keeping with the project’s origins. The design was light activated and allowed performers to interact with the sculpture to change parameters in the sound scape. I was aware that there were existing PC and Mac based technologies that would have allowed me to do this but I had a strong desire to achieve the design through an entirely analogue system as this seemed to mirror more closely the non linear processes in nature I was interested in. As an improviser and sculptor there was something philosophically important (and fun) in the component of invention- assembling a working system from first principles. In the end I had to compromise for reasons of flexibility and time and settled on using an Arduino board to drive an analogue software synthesiser, ABox.
In action.. https://vimeo.com/26264193
A further development looked like this. 
There is much more I want to do with this project at the same time I recognise it is driven as much by the play of bricolage and inventiveness as the performative possibilities of the soundscape. I’m attracted to the idea that as our lives (and bodies) are increasingly drawn into a coporately owned world there are possibilies for reclaiming technological space though Open Source technologies like Arduino and Ubuntu.
Noel Perkins 