Overview
- Year
- 2023
- Partner / Institution
- Teatros del Canal — Máquina Orgánica exhibition, Canal Connect 2023 festival (Madrid)
- Role / Contribution
- Interactivity architecture and mediation (jointly with Alfredo Miralles, Fabiola Simonetti and Fernando Fernández)
A workshop for the collective creation and production of an interactive installation to build a symbiotic relationship between the Madrid community and the "Máquina Orgánica" exhibition at Teatros del Canal (Canal Connect 2023).
About the collaboration
Allelopathy is a biological phenomenon in which an organism has the ability to produce chemical compounds that influence the reproduction, survival, and growth of other organisms.
Could we humans use art and technology to activate a channel of communication that influences the plant world so that empathy, care, and respect for its mysterious universe may manifest within us? This interactive piece reveals a group of people’s 48-hour attempt to discover this through biosonification (the process by which we convert the electrical information from plants into sound) and visual art.
In the creative process, a whole universe of phrases and words emerges that, rather than unveiling any mystery, offers us the opportunity to become instruments of the great plant orchestra before us and to merge our sensations with its electrical impulses, allowing its own nature—within this context imposed by us—to govern the final sound outcome of this installation. Thus, we allow ourselves, in a shared fantasy, to flourish anew within its mysteries.
Description of Interactivity:
It consists of a biodata sensor that receives the plant’s electrical impulses, which influence the textures of the soundscape and also trigger the audio voice samples. Visually, it affects the movement of RGB on the plant’s visual “aura,” which reveals the plant’s image in real time via a camera; it also affects the green spherical grid we see, with the plant’s signals causing it to deform and change. There is a second biodata sensor designed for humans, which affects the visual representation of the plant’s aura, causing noise and pixelation, and also affects the image of the videos selected within the sphere, creating a distortion in the space-time of these images.
We invite the viewer to touch these sensors, lightly brushing each
part of the copper sensor attached to the right wall with both hands.
This piece was created during a workshop with most of the participants from our INTERACTIVAS group, for Teatros del Canal in Madrid.
Documentation
Video
Details
Process Artist and coodinator: Joaku de Sotavento
Mentors: Alfredo Miralles (artistic management and production), Fabiola Simonetti (visual mentoring), Fernando Fernández (sound and interactive mentoring)
Coordination: Sara Antequera
Participants/Creators:
Natalia Frías
Salomé Méndez
Nerele
Luis Mir
Natalia Recalde
Elena Vigo
Ari Agliati
Lelé Guillén
Pedro Fraguela
María Castro
Daniel Cruz Gonzalez
Iván Simó
Carles Gutiérrez
Hamilton Mestizo
