SIMPLE but COMPLEX: Tim Otto Roth has been exploring the fascinating facets of self-organisation for over 15 years, whether by means of traditional weaving, performances or extended illuminated sound sculptures.
From Reproduction to Production: For thousands of years knotted carpets were used to reproduce preconfigured maps. In the MaSo carpet project, creating novel complex patterns based on a simple neighbourhood rule is a social experiment with carpet weavers in rural India.
MaSo floor in the exhibition Logical Fantasies at Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche Aschaffenburg (2020): the retroreflecting circles changed the tiles into a giant mosaic.
Aura calculata is a permanent sound installation based on the pixelsex principle inaugurated in spring 2015 at the Lehmann Centre at TU Dresden.
A year later premiered an organ version of aura calculata based on changing water levels in organ pipes.
A second edition of aura calculata with illuminated speakers was realized as a kind of chandelier with 23 units for the exhibition Circulating Sounds – Deep Doppler meets mathematical socialism at the Goethe Institute Hanoi (2017).
A recent derivate is the Sonapticon which combines neuronal self-organization with acoustics in space. Illuminated loudspeakers turn into audio neurons creating acoustic networks by interacting with the other agents by specific tones.
The Music of Life even applies the principle to interacting musician of a choir or a string orchestra with concerts among other at the Deutsche Hygiene Museum or the ZKM Karlsruhe.
The first electronic installation in 2009: In Chromology standard disco colour wheels turn into colour clocks exchanging their colour states with their neighbours. Static colour relationships as formulated for instance by Paul Klee in his Kunstlehre are literally diversified.
The artist extends chromatically the binary PIXELSEX principle developing new grammars to link colours dynamically. Coloursex is a series of presentations using windows and glass facades as interaction matrices for an iterative colour logics evolving line by line.
In 2005/2006 Tim Otto Roth realized in collaboration with the biomodelling group around Prof. Andreas Deutsch at TU Dresden the first large scale PIXELSEX project. Pixel bacteria animated literally the light wall at the KPN Telecom Tower in Rotterdam.
Artist Tim Otto Roth in front of two Maso carpets in organge and blue (70 x 200cm) in his studio in Oppenau. Image: Pauline Fabry.
PIXELSEX brings literally the mathematical self-organization principle of cellular automata to the point: Like in a football stadium spatio-temporal patterns as the Mexican wave evolve without a central control or directing instance, but are the result of the local interaction of agents with their neighbouring agents according to simple rules. In Tim Otto Roth's series of projects such agents can be pixels of a light façade in public space, a knot in a traditional carpet or human performers as in a choir. To express eventual social implications Tim Otto Roth uses in recent years also the concept of Mathematical Socialism (MaSo).
20 September - 8 June 2025 As part of the exhibition Fellow Travellers. Art as a tool to change the world MaSo-Carpet #1 and the making-of-video In search of Gandhi's lost spinning wheel are on view at the Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
2 - 4 March 2023 A new kind of science – a new kind of art? Towards an aesthetics of complexity, invited speaker at Second Asean Symposium on Cellular Automata Technology (ASCAT), Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, India
3 October 2021 Peri-Sonapticon: First light and sound for the Peri-Sonapticon: Yérri-Gaspar Hummel reveals with his saxophone play the inherent acoustic intelligence of the 41 audio neurons – housed units of two speakers, leds and a microelectronic.
2 - 4 March 2023 A new kind of science – a new kind of art? Towards an aesthetics of complexity, invited speaker at Second Asean Symposium on Cellular Automata Technology (ASCAT), Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, India
26 November 2021 Self-organization as anthropological challenge – “mathematical socialism” as novel paradigm, (online) guest talk at the conference
"Survival environment - strange practices of environmental interaction", Perm Museum of Contemporary Art,
Perm, RU, 15h CET, Aufzeichnung: 
12 November 2020 Der Charme des diskreten Fehlers – wenn der Mathematische Sozialismus zur Kunst wird,
guest talk, 6. BMG-Tag, Berliner Mathematische Gesellschaft, 17:00 h.
21 May 2019 From bacterial pixels to sounding nano-circuits – confronting self-organisation models with living agents, artist talk at BioClub, Shibuya, Tokyo (JP), 19:00h
27 October 2021, Vernetzt wie Nervenzellen, by Rainer Braxmaier, Offenburger Tageblatt
16 April 2019, A report by Sandipan Talukdar in the Indian online journal Newsklick: Weaving Mathematical Principles Into Indian Carpets, NewsClick India
October 2015 Aura Calculata – die Klang- und Lichtkunst von Tim Otto Roth siedeln an der Schnittstelle von Kunst und Wissenschaft, by Helga de la Motte-Haber,
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 05/2015, pp. 34-37
October 2022 In Search of Textile Roots of Computing: The Genesis of the First MaSo Carpet in India, by Tim Otto Roth, chapter in: A. Adamatzky (ed).: Unconventional Computing, Arts, Philosophy (2022), pp. 271-279.
December 2021, The Charme of the Discrete Error – When Mathematical Socialism Becomes Art, by Tim Otto Roth, Journal of Cellular Automata16.1-2, p. 153-171.
25 June 2021 About the robustness of 1d cellular automata revising their temporal entropy by Tim Otto Roth, in Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena Volume 425, November 2021.
March 2020, Logische Phantasien, Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche Aschaffenburg, exhibition catalogue with contributions by Sebastian Baden, Thomas Richter, Miriam Seidler, Barbara Maria Stafford,
Kehrer Heidelberg, 96 pages.
September 2019, Soundart edited by Peter Weibel shows on three double pages the Heaven's Carousel, the Sonapticon and the water organ aura calculata,
MIT Press 2019.