Orchestrated Systems brings together artists who build instruments, machines, and environments that perform. Rather than treating technology as a neutral tool, each artist approaches it as an expressive system-one that listens, responds, repeats, drifts, or resists control. Across sound, motion, and signal, the exhibition explores what it means to compose experiences through constructed systems, and how audiences encounter meaning through them.
Each work in the exhibition represents a distinct approach to machine performance:
Nathaniel Ober’s sound-based installations draw from landscape, science, and astrophysics, translating environmental forces and data into immersive spatial sound. His work functions as a listening structure – an apparatus that gives voice to phenomena that usually exist beyond human perception, inviting audiences to slow down and attune themselves to subtle shifts in sound and space.
Eric Heep’s spatial sound array transforms the gallery itself into an instrument. The multi-channel system interprets and performs scores by participating artists, filtering them through Eric’s technical and artistic sensibility. Sound moves across space rather than emanating from a single source, challenging traditional ideas of authorship, composition, and where a performance begins and ends.
Maddy Weaver and Charles Tuttle’s Reclaimed Orchestra takes a more visibly mechanical approach. Repurposing discarded hard drive armatures into a kinetic ensemble, the work converts electrical signals into motion, rhythm, and percussion. By animating e-waste into a robotic orchestra, the piece highlights both the hidden musicality of industrial objects and the environmental histories embedded within them. Electronic control and acoustic sound collapse into a single, hybrid performance.
Together, these works frame the exhibition as an ecosystem of systems-machines that play, structures that listen, and instruments that perform over time. Orchestrated Systems invites audiences to experience technology not as background infrastructure, but as an active, expressive presence-one that shapes how we hear, move, and understand the world around us.
At Relay, this exhibition reflects an ongoing commitment to artist-driven, technically ambitious work that rewards attention and curiosity. Rather than prioritizing immediacy or spectacle, Orchestrated Systems creates space for careful listening, repeated encounters, and an appreciation for how meaning emerges through orchestration.
Public Programs
Programming for Orchestrated Systems includes a hands-on Max/MSP workshop led by Eric Heep, offering participants an introduction to working with sound, signal, and spatial audio systems. The exhibition will also feature an intimate listening room series, showcasing individual scores and compositions as they are interpreted and expressed through the works on view, providing deeper insight into the performative relationships between artists, machines, and sound.
Opening Night: March 7 (6pm-9pm)
Max/MSP Workshop with Eric Heep: March 11 (6pm-8pm)
Wave Synthesis Array Performance: March 19 (7pm-10pm)
