The paper describes the design, production and usage of the "Rumentarium", a computer-based sound generating system involving physical objects as sound sources. The Rumentarium is a set of handmade resonators, acoustically excited by DC motors, interfaced to a computer by four microcontrollers. Following an ecological/anthropological perspective, in the Rumentarium discarded materials are used as sound sources. While entirely computationally-controlled, the Rumentarium is an acoustic sound generator. The paper provides a general description of the Rumentarium and discusses some artistic applications.

Tabula-ex-cambio is an interactive installation that delivers visual and audio content. It works as a sort of perpetual billiard game, powered by the data originating from the trend of a stock exchange index. The visual content is a real-time animated 3D computer graphics, that represents a billiard game where each ball is associated with a stock in the index. The audio content is an electroacoustic music composition featuring as many layers of sounds as stocks in the index. All the balls in the billiard are musical sources that play an iterated sequence of sounds while moving on the billiard table; each sequence is altered in frequency by the trend of the related company index. The final delivered visual and audio contents depend on the interaction with the user, who can select a view/listening point on the billiard game. The physical installation consists of a deformed billiard structure connected to a stele through cables; the stele is a vertical display where the billiard game takes place. The visual display relies on the graphic engine Ogre, while the aural display is implemented in SuperCollider. The installation was exposed in Shanghai, Beijing, Birmingham, and Terni (Italy).

Alighiero Boetti is one of the most representative contemporary Italian artist and his opus is raising a constantly growing international interest. Many of his works can be realized on very different supports and make use of algorithmic procedures. This paper presents a concert-performance for piano, five video projectors, real-time audio-video processing, an interactive chessboard, and involves a pianist, a "director" and two "players". The multimedia event is directly related to a series of works by Boetti featuring a grid-filling algorithm which has been implemented by the artist on a huge variety of planar supports through many collective projects. In this sense, the event is intended to be another possible realization of the original work exploiting a multimodal support, i.e. including sound (music and audio processing) and emphasizing the generative process defined by Boetti's algorithm through interactivity. An analysis of a corpus of 50 realized Boetti's works - all based on the same algorithm - has been conducted in order to define meaningful mapping strategies from the visual domain to music and audio-video processing. The project makes use of a networked systems for real time DSP which is controlled by wooden cubes on an interactive chessboard.

The rapid evolution of technology and the processing aspects of some contemporary art forms make maintenance and re-fruition of a number of past masterpieces a difficult task. This is especially true of multimedia installations, with multiple audio and video sources coordinated through some control device, which also accounts for user interaction issues. So, it is not inappropriate to speak of "archeology of multimedia" in the case of the remise-en-oeuvre of an installation. This paper describes a complete example of archeology of multimedia. In particular, the art exhibit is the reprise of the first truly multimedia show of the electronic era: Le Corbusier's Poême électronique, displayed at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. The show, conceived for the Philips Pavilion and consisting of a black&white video, color light ambiances, music moving over sound routes, visual special effects, has never been reprised after the end of the exhibition. The Poême électronique has been entirely reconstructed after a philological investigation through image archives, project sketches and technical documentation from Philips and then delivered in two virtual reality settings. Moreover, two aspects of the project are worth being abstracted from the design and realization of this specific reconstruction and contribute to the design, pre-visualization and fruition of novel contemporary artworks: a language for the description of the control score and an architecture design for the integration of several media sources. The language and the architecture, with a sketch of a friendly interface, are illustrated at the end of the paper.