Straight outta Hong Kong, Electroplankton arrived at the Harlsden DHS depot on Monday .Despite the fact that I tend to pay extra to get these things delivered properly, rather than rely on the chronically untrackable Royal Mail/international equivalent, I always end up cycling to Harlsden to pick the parcel up because they only deliver at stupid times (i.e. when I’m at work, the only times when I’ve not been at work is when they deliver it at 7:30 on Saturday morning and I have a terrible hangover) and refuse to consider giving a more accurate time for redelivery than “sometime between 7:00 and 18:00. The worst time was when I got the train thinking it would be quicker and I ended up having to run all the way from Wilsden Junction to the depot so I could get my XBox home and get to my DnD game on time.

Anyway the ‘game’ is great. In case you don’t know, what you do is manipualte various species of electroplankton which make simple noises according to simple rules. The results are hypnotic, often beautiful and occasionally a horrible mess but all these are equally valid outcomes, the software doesn’t judge you.

In the setup shown above you bounce little fish off leaves, the angle of which you can adjust, and the position hit the leaf determines the pitch of the note they produce (I think), you can also cause flowers to bloom by getting all the leaves to turn red. It’s very reminiscent of the wonderful ball droppings.

Remember when Brian Eno was allways going on about generative music but never really came up with the goods? Well Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton is the goods, a commercial generative music album; you can put it in performance mode and have a perfectly passable ambient record generated for you on the fly, sound wise think Warp’s Artificial Inteligence compilations, or you can play (with) the music yourself (some of the setups really do feel like otherworldly musical instruments) manipulating the algorithms through a simple user interface.

So is it a game? Is it art? Yeah I think it probably is both, it makes you realise that playing instruments and doodling and generally the act of creation is also a game, which when you think about it seems obvious I suppose.