Robodynamic Diffusion (RDD) is an innovative instrument that unfolds sound waves through spatial effects. RDD system occurs at the level of collective composition. The piece is developed through an improvisational process, usually between three human performers: Jan St. Werner generates live sounds, reaching for frequencies that challenge and vibrate the room’s resonances; the robot’s navigator and machinist Michael Akstaller controls its volume and movements, diffusing these sounds to create moving patterns of reflection and interference; meanwhile Oliver Mayer takes care of the code and core, interacting with the matrix of the computational system – all of them attending to how the overall shape and performance prompts engagement by the audience.

The robot, designed in collaboration with the industrial robotics company Evocortex, becomes a visual agent tracing these multiple responses as they pass through it: a character playing out the abstract drama of listening and sounding, movement and response, aural and social collaboration that form the spatial performance. 
Nele Jaeger’s sculptural design for RDD seems to develop from these associations, superimposing circular and rectangular shapes on the robotic figure that suggest the shapes of motion and expressive vectors potential within it

„But RDD is not intended to be the work’s focus. It is important primarily for the displacements it can affect: controlled disorientations and sensory redirections which invite a refreshed engagement with the choreographed situation, toward a sense of space that is multi-perspectival and responsive. These displacements begin with the speakers themselves. Spatialized audio, whether multichannel surround or wave field synthesis, is delivered traditionally from a set of fixed loudspeakers. Movement is simulated by the transition of sound between these fixed elements. This defines what RDD co-founder Jan St. Werner calls a ‘room within a room’, a kind of virtual space of listening placed within the real space we occupy as persons.

The audience for an RDD performance is invited to move and explore these acoustic effects, to displace themselves from their passive position as audience-receivers and into a system of feedback and response as listener-collaborators.“

RDD is a project by Michael Akstaller, Oliver Mayer, Jan St. Werner, and Juerg Andreas Meister — operator of RDD
Supported by LEONARDO – Zentrum für Kreativität und Innovation TH Nürnberg und Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden