A single oscillator pulses with a regular rhythm. Sensing others, it adjusts its pulses to fall into sync with them.

We experience this throughout nature and culture—in the sounds of crickets, the lights of fireflies, the cells of your heart, a clapping audience, the lockstep of soldiers, or the chant of a protest. Equilibrium, however, is elusive—synchrony is never entirely complete or stable.

In Synchronizing Uncertainty, hundreds of electronic circuits populate a hushed space. As visitors move through, the circuits erupt into pulsing light and sound, setting off a cascade of polyrhythms as they negotiate their temporal differences.

How it’s done: the mathematicians Renato Mirollo and Steven Strogatz (1990) first proved that pulsing oscillators can synchronize if they adjust their timing in response to one another according to a nonlinear function. Each circuit in Synchronizing Uncertainty comprises a microcontroller programmed in this way. While it emits light and sound via an LED and a piezo speaker, each circuit communicates with the others over a wireless mesh network, sending a radio ping in time with its pulses. A motion sensor in the circuit activates it when visitors walk nearby, and it begins to adjust its timing as it receives pings from its neighbors. As individual circuits fall into groups, factions emerge. Circuits caught in the middle are unstable, pulled in multiple directions. Everything is entirely bottom-up, as each circuit is autonomous; nothing controls the system as a whole.

Synchronizing Uncertainty models the dynamics observed in mechanical and biological systems. But it also serves as a rhythmic metaphor for broader human behavior. Sync can be positive—like the way two lovers adapt to each other’s rhythms. Or it can be negative, such as the echo chambers of social media or fascist groupthink. Mathematics tells us sync is inevitable; in practice, it is contingent. In this work, difference is not a problem to be solved—the process of negotiation is the point.