On Sound Unsound 2 of 8

There we go. Okay, so welcome everyone to the second session of On Sound Unsound. I hope you're doing great. For today we have our first guest lecture. I'll shortly present her. So Leslie Garcia is from Tijuana, Mexico, and she was associate researcher at a nano laboratory nucleus at the final school at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She was artistic researcher in the media environment department at the Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany. Leslie Garcia is currently fellow at the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of Mexico,

a fellow of the DAAD in Berlin, that is the German Academic Exchange Service, who also has a great art department. Leslie Garcia is an electronic sound artist and digital media developer. explores the fusion the fusion process between art and technology using techniques such as electronic prototyping audio production net art hardware development and biological interfaces she is a co-founder of their artistic and and the artistic director of bioart collective inter specifics founder of electronic media collective dream additive additive and the

co-founder of astro vandalistas today leslie casier will give a lecture on her artistic practice and artistic research focusing on data sonification through the lecture there will be be some sound examples, so please use headphones for sound quality. After the lecture, I think we'll have just a small break. And then we will go into a discussion based on student presentations from Aladdin and Daniel. And Enda and Romelu will be responders upon those presentations. And with that, Leslie Casilla. Thank you. It's really nice to see so many faces, even

there is virtually, but it's nice. So today I would like to focus on the practices of inter-specifics. I also do some sound production myself under the ideas of micro, and that's more like conventional production processes, but I also build some instruments for these practices. In the case of inter-specifics, we are a collective, five people from different parts of the world. We have some people from Brazil, Diego Gerson, we have Chile, Felipe Rebolledo, we have Spain, Carles Tardio, and the other

it's Mexicans mainly, Paloma Lopez and Emanuel Anguiano. And I would like first define the work of interspecifics as based on the Latin American context. It's very important for us to ground or work in this context because we work under circumstances of precarity and to approach science and to approach knowledge and we also like to acknowledge the idea of ancestral technologies we look a lot about the idea how our ancestors developed different technological apparatus and understandings around the biological work and we try to retake those

knowledges and combine them with our western technological traditions and culture also because we are half and half of those visions so i'm going to start with the presentation okay So, beyond data sonification, the practice of data-driven composition in empiric specifics work, we started by doing data sonification in a very formal way, in the scientific way, trying to represent physical phenomena into very understandable lines of sound.

The problem we find is the over time this became a little bit boring. It's like a dead end in a way. So we start exploring different ways of interacting with data so we can find a more interesting, more open space of understanding. Let me know if you are seeing the next screen or if... Yes, perfect. so as we say here we we call ourselves multi-species we because we consider the other organism organisms part of the collective also we say this because it's very difficult to gather these microorganisms to give them the proper conditions to grow to understand fully the biological process

that surround the the basic needs we are research borough founded in mexico city in 2013 our current lights of research are focused on the use of sound and artificial intelligence to understand the electrical and chemical signals of different living organisms and its geometry patterns as non-human form of communication this is very important because we find in this case something similar as sound as the avatar of the spirits sound of the avatar of nature that lets the intangible to speak and communicate this is a very important element in our work

because we are working with intangible mire with intangible phenomena and we use sound to give this intangible phenomena a voice and a way of expression a way of agency for many indigenous cultures around the world sound is the bridge between realities So this is something that is present in many anthropological sound studies, the way that indigenous culture use sound and music to communicate to different levels of reality, even to interfere in their own reality, to change process, to call rain, to avoid sickness

and all these ideas they're present all over Latin America, all over Asia, and we like a lot to take these concepts. How do we approach sound? So for us sound is a physical phenomenon. We know that sound is the result of the physical vibration of particles and to be able to find sound in an audible way we need a medium that vibrates and makes sound move around this space Sun as a medium, a multimodal phenomena, energy capable to form reality and to shape space

and time. When we say multimodal phenomena, we refer to the ability of sound, and not only be something that we can understand with the ears we understand sound with the whole body is a vibrational process that interacts in many levels with our own bodies and most important that sends electrical signals to our brain which is the basis of the bioelasticity process of our brains So sound is an excellent element to transmit non-tangible phenomena, turn it into electrical process and enables the brain to perceive and receive new phenomenal experiences.

Of course, as a psychoacoustic effect, sound has the ability to interfere in our emotional process, to change the state of our brain waves and to tune them into specific states and the case of this image we are seeing the results of an experiment we made some years ago trying to find different states of the brain while listening and observing specific works of art so we sort of try to to see how these psychoacoustic effects works on the brain level of course and as an ontological machine sounds allows to transfer not only semantical

or symbolical information is information itself and as a form of energy it contains contains its own communication parameters so this is a the perspective of a collective that is working with sound from this idea of combining science technology and arts as one element we don't be fear if we are doing science or if we are doing sound art or if we are doing technology for us is the same it's all embedded in this idea of artistic research so one important question for us is how do we approach reality because we think

reality is the main problem we are approaching here so we see reality with limits and restrictions for the sensorial human interface if the perception of reality is a mediation of the phenomena that emerges with its own agency and materiality or bandwidth or senses bandwidth to perceive it is crucial in that sense we find that we have a deal a great deal of a problem because the amount of information that we are capable to process is very limited. We can see this here, this is the whole electromagnetic spectrum and that's just the visible light, very teeny

amount of the whole phenomena that is emerging and arising among those. One interesting thing is that we find that there is a lot of different organisms that are capable to perceive outside this limitation. So one question we ask is that if it's possible to interconnect the experience of the other to the human experience by the use of sound. Same occurs with the sound process. We can only perceive the blue string and everything else is is outside our perception, even though interacts with our bodies and affects them,

but we don't have a conscious interaction with these other ultrasound and infrasound spectrums. So we propose for this something that we call sensory expansion. So sensory expansion is a process of combining the human senses with the non-traditional senses with the non-human senses to create a broader spectrum of perception and by so expand our way of perceiving reality this is the main core of interspecific research the possibility of expanding the sensorial interface of the human

by the use of technology and by the use of sound as the main communication tool for these purposes just a second so these tools are heavily based in the idea that reality has an agency on their own And this is some ideas from physicist and philosopher Karen Barat. We can see the transformation of matter in different ways. Neomaterialism proposes that the interaction with reality is the emergency of different agencies,

of different forms of intelligence that are dancing in between them, acting in between them creating the complexity of what we perceive so we can see that around the years there is a lot of similar ideas which has this uh societies term we have heidegger with the agents the losing battery with the adjustment the mangle of practices by pickering togetherness and so on. So this idea it's been present in our philosophical thinking and we find it as a very important element for us because we sort of want to be able to create devices

that allows the materiality of these agencies to express themselves through our devices and through the use of sound. How do we do this? So we use transduction and we ask, call sound become a transduction bridge between languages allowing us to experiment the otherness through our own body. So transduction is a term that is used in engineering. It means translating or transforming one form of energy into another form of energy. So in this case, we can see, for example, a circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm in which

the body synchronizes the rhythmical process of sleep and awakeness. And we can see that a A circadian rhythm has its own phase, its own period, it has an amplitude, and very easily we can understand the way to transduce these phenomena into a sonic phenomenon. We can simply map the phase of the circadian rhythm into a phase of a sine wave, for example, the period, amplitude, and so on. That's a very linear way of transducing, of sonifying a phenomenon. We can transduce everything from electromagnetism, bioelectricity, light, morphology arrangements,

topologies and data. And in our particular case, this takes us to the idea of biomusic, which is a class of electronic system that uses biological potentials in feedback loops to induce powerful, predictable, repeatable psychological states which can be controlled in real time. And it's a technique that has been around since the 50s. Researchers like Manford L. Ethan, David Rosenboom were one of the first pioneers working with this idea of bio music. The importance of the bio music was coined by Orcus research, which is the work between

Andrea Damasky and Eduardo Miranda, where they were working with this organism called called Physarum polycephalum. So the first one is focused on the analog behavior of an organism by his bioelectrical activity and the possibility to turn this bioelectrical activity into a sound synthesizer system. We work with them during a period of time and we developed this device with which is the energy bending lab and it's a it's it's inspired of course in the um euro rack modulars we made this exercise in 2014 so the idea was to be able

to build a modular that was capable to connect with other organisms and to use the bioelectrical energy of those organisms to create sound interactions. For us, bioelectricity is very important because we found bioelectricity also as a global language. Everything that is alive emits bioelectricity energy. And more interesting, like bigger phenomena in space also creates electricity as a way of transmitting in specific energy signatures and streams of communication. So that was we decided to start by working with something very little. And in this case, the idea of the synthesizer

is also to use as a non-conventional computing. Because at the end, we are making a stable, single processes with each one of the models. divide them, zoom them, combine them, mix them, and by so creating a sound process as result. I want to show you, I'm gonna stop this a little bit. I want to show another screen. This is screen. Okay, let me know if you're seeing Google document. Yes, okay. Sorry, I have to come back to the beginning.

So this is a real-time sonification using bioelectrical oscillatory behavior. So we study this organism Fisaron polycephalon, which is the organism growing in this petri dish that you can see here. see here and we find that this organism has an oscillatory behavior that represents itself as a bioelectrical signal and as a resistant feature why is this important to sound because those parameters are the base of electronic sound design so in this case we are positioning itself in the way of an instrument maker. So to be able to create an instrument for this organism,

we first need to know how this organism behaves and what's the qualities of the organism. So this is the first version of the energy vending lab. You can see it's a very bulky, big prototype and it has everything you need to create a complex sound process from oscillators to filters to mathematical analysis processes so the methodology to do this is this is important because we have to figure out the whole thing was to create this system that is based on something that is called multi-array electrode so it's different electrodes that gonna be connected by the organism itself so here we can see a representation of the physarium moving from

one point another and creating different currents of electricity and energy and those signals are the signals that we're going to use in the future to create sound or we use in and during this process to create sound. So here we have Fisaron, these circles are oat flakes because that's the chemical attractant that Fisaros looks for and then the lines are Fisaron growing in these are aluminium fingers where we connect our clips to retrieve the energy coming out from them. So this was our first approach. Of course, we have to explore different processes, what kind of nutrients Fisauri needs, what kind of medium we're going to use to have a neutral medium and

be sure that the electricity we're gathering is just the organism and not the noise in the environment. So that's a lot of work to process. Then we have these arrays of Fisarum. They are connected over here and that's the instrument, basically like the main signal. And then you can see here the arising signal from the Fisarum. This is really important because we use a software process to analyze the signals, signals to retrieve a rouse signal, minimum, maximum, average and so on. So we can have this kind of different states of the same signal analyzed to be sent in two ways as

a CV signal to control or synthesizer or to be used as an OSC, open zone control signal to plug, I don't know, maximum speed, pure data, or any other instruments capable to communicate by OSE. So we have here a little bit of the code we use to create the raw values. So it's a very standard analytic performance of the values. And then we have the conversion of those values into OSC messages to create the patterns. This is the main core of the electronic system

we're using to create sound. So it's CD45A4 hex mix trigger, a MOSP chip that is used to interconnect different signals in a reiterative way. So you can create a stronger, more audible and more stable sound emission. And here is our inputs. We have a bio input, which is where we connect the organism. And the idea of this is that the electrical signal of the organism is going to activate the whole electrical system. So it takes the system and creates an oscillatory process,

sort of like a clock signal into the electronics. And then here we have some of the different modules we designed for modular. It's very straightforward electronics. We have the use of capacitive signals to trigger different kinds of tones and we use resistance to change pitch and so on. Each one has a name and here is the mixer. And here is a version for PD where you can interact with those OSE signal in a software level.

We have a five voice synthesizer that is totally controlled by the incoming data from the organism. So I'm gonna stop this a little bit and I'm gonna share some sound coming from here. So we're gonna listen first, 24 hours of visarium growing in these multi-array cells. So this is the first sound. Just give me a signal if you can listen properly.

Something very important to note here is that the growing process of Fisarum for us is invisible because it's so slow that we are not capable to see these little movements that is performing over time. So in terms of bioelectrical accumulation, we use a technique similar to time lapse. So every second we store a single data and then we create a 24 hour stream of data of the 24 hour growing process of this atom. As you can see here, we have a spike over here, which is coming to the end of the first generation of this atom because they regenerate itself every 24 hours.

So here is the first part is the stable growing process, very continuous and simple. And you can hear the expansion of the oscillatory cell. It goes out and then contracts itself back. And that's the electrical signal we are listening. Then we're going to move a little bit. And in this event that occurs here we have an interesting spike. What happened there? The physarum organism in order to find food expands itself all over the territory and

senses the space. he find a suitable source of food it contracts itself back again and only sends one little line of itself into the the food that's a very energy efficient way of finding and deciding that's why the fish arm is known as an intelligent organism because it performs logical algorithmical decision making and this spike we're seeing here is the moment when he says yes this is my source i'm going here so that was like the first um exercise we made with the system i'm going to continue over here

then we decided to make a more complex system that just the bioelectrical because we wanted to have a bidimensional observation of the organism. So to do a bidimensional observation we have our first vector which is the bioelectrical vector and then we decide to add computer vision in order to follow the movement of the organism on space. And this decision of using computer vision is something that is still with us we find it as a really interesting tool and you're going to see in the next exercises so this is the feed tracker and the feed tracker what it does is looking at the same multi-array i showed you before and analyzes the number of heads

that's why it's called a pisarum polycephalon because it creates many heads but it's only a single cell organism that's the strange part it's able to create many dimensional heads and move around the space but it's based on a one cell process so we use these different tracking systems using a logitech camera computer vision and a technique of blob analyzing to analyze how big is growing and the position of the blocks on the space over time and we use that to compare with the bioelectrical data we have so now we have an oscillator creating this stable sound

but now we have also the ability to create a sequencer on top of that because we can sequence the amount of steps that are emerging on the cv tool and we can listen now to a more complex process emerging from the complexity of having an oscillator plug into the into the sorry have a sequencer plug into the oscillator

So here we have three parts, searching part, approaching, and finding. so so there was the first exercise using this new arrangement of the of the sequencer then with

the same technique we added some extra elements to be able to create notes on time depending on the position of the heads and to translate those also as filters and also to use them for example to track an absinthe from native instruments which is a very popular synthesizer so we say okay maybe we can see what kind of uh inputs we can create by using our system with a commercial one and then we have this the phyzerian sonification which is a complete sound sound made out of the interaction

Thank you. so that was the phisarum exercise so we found that we have a very interesting tool out of creating

this energy vending lab system so we decided to start working with different types of organisms not only Fisaro. And we created different ways to create this approach. Over here. In this case, we use also So these organisms that are called electron bacteria and the electron bacteria, it's a very interesting kind of bacteria that cleans from heavy metals the soil.

These bacteria is used to create bioremediation in different parts of the world, like a new scientific trend because they can clean up spaces that are heavily polluted like minary areas or chemical interaction spaces and we create these little boxes that are called biofuel cells to produce energy out of these bacteria i'm going to show you a little video So here I am sort of analyzing the bioelectrical fluctuations on these biofuels. So the bacteria breaks down the materials and creates energy by breaking down these minerals

or different chemical reactors. This is the bacteria and that's a nanowire, the way they connect to each other and transmit energy. so i'm trying to not to be too heavy with the biological and scientifical part of this because we can go deeper into why they broke down everything and then we're going to miss the sound part so i'm just showing you the the source of action for which we create sound

because it's very important because are those organisms but then after we know all these about the organisms we create specific patches and connections to plug them into the system and to be able to have them creating interpretations in some of their own living processes. So what I like about this is that we are listening to the phenomena emerge through an electrical system. And of course there is a lot of decision making in terms of which sound are we using and what kind of sound characteristics is going to happen. in that sense is a collaborative process because the energy they're producing the characteristics

of of their energy are already telling us what kind of possible sound characteristics they can have and so we decide over this observation and then we just make this um artistic decision aesthetical decision of using a specific sound characteristic to map their processes and to play together with those processes because then we have also the part where we create the live performance with the organism or an installation in this case is a live performance together with the fisaro we can see here

You can see there the contraction, the oscillatory process I was talking before, they contract and retract and that creates a change of energy on the parameters we are reading. so so in our table we have of course lots of samples of the organism we have microscopes we have our

energy vending lab we have a mixer we have some filters and then we have the computer vision system analyzing the things we have under the microscope and the idea is to perform an experiment andrew pickering a physicist and philosopher says the science is a performative action so every time you reproduce an experiment you are performing every part of the experiment is part of a synchronized performative experience and we decided to take this in a very literal way to put the performative of science into these live acts together with the organisms and to push this idea of deep listening into the unknown because to be able to listen to

Fisarum or to listen a specific bacteria we will need micro microphones and this technology it exists since the 90s but it's extremely expensive and complicated because you can get some information maybe from the bacteria but you're gonna have a lot of noise from outside the bacteria like cars passing by. We did this experiment in the in the acoustic isolated space in the University of Mexico and it was impossible for us to record anything valuable in that way because it's a lot of noise in that level. and we try we still try i think at some point we're going to be able to listen to the matter

itself but meanwhile we have this capacity we are using traduction to let the materiality take life through sound and this is the core of our artistic sound practice like the ability to to create these relations to finding science uh prospect to work with and then create a whole environment for this prospect to take over the system and perform with us that's the the main idea on this and it's evolved over time the sounds and the processes and of course it's very important for us to show what we are seeing

we are super inspired by the sci-fi um aesthetics of course and counters of the third kind but with microorganisms instead of organisms from outside the planet and yeah that's like the one one when our first exercise now i'm gonna show you i'm gonna continue the presentation let me know if you are fine from here everyone is following i'm going too fast too slow okay cool let's continue just a second you will be able to see the presentation okay we're now back

so let's talk a little bit about noise and the possibility of finding patterns inside noise Noise is a very important area in terms of sound art. We have John Cage doing this exercise, trying to be an absolute silence. And what he found was that it was not absolute silence at all. Then, some years later, we came out with this idea of the background noise to refer to the inability of have absolute natural silence in the world as experience. So noise is an apparently inarticulated acoustic signal that is difficult to process both perceptually

and aesthetically for the human being. But for us noise is more than an auditory phenomenon. For us it's a field of possibilities. In the context of signal analysis, sound is a heavy source of information that is not organized or analyzed already. So after you make a process of analyzing sound, you can divide them into different harmonical signals or content signals. And in the case of inter-specifics, for us sound is the matter in which we try to gather these communication patterns that emerges from the organisms.

Part of the work we do is first listen to these emissions, arbusts of acoustic signals coming from our systems. And then we do a lot of analysis on the signals to identify a specific exercises like, OK, here we have a very specific response to acoustic matter. Here we have light, here we have touch and so on. And I can show this by showing this project from a little ago. It was one of our first experiments. Just give me a second, going back to here.

uh sorry so we the first time we did this noise analysis was with this project we call pulsum plantae and it was in 2010 2011 something like that and the exercise was all around identifying the different reactions of sound into a biofeedback system with plants. So after two years of analyzing these apparently noise signals, we were able to divide them into a specific stimulus into the plant.

So the plant's reaction to our interactions were embedded in this noise signal. and then when we managed to divide them we were capable to interact in a specific way with the plant so that was the interaction of a person touching the plant which releases a calcium

reaction inside the membrane of the plant which makes the signal go negative and then in a similar way we were able to detect the acoustic vibratory reaction of the plant

to sound on the space like a very low five piezoelectric microphone is the same the same principle the the capacitive effect of the plant to receive light store the light change the resistance

variation on the plant and in the same way change the sound process so this is one of the examples of processing noise signals divide them and create a pattern observation over those signals okay we're going back to the presentation So, we call this hybrid interfaces for art and science. This idea of combining technological

devices, combining sound devices. Sound itself is one of the most recorded phenomena in history to find ways of capturing, to capture the trace of sound, by first the making of these vessels of ceramic that used to have the lines of acoustic vibration. It's like a pre-recording invention. They were found even in Egypt ruins, like, I don't know, thousands of years ago. And then we have the phonograph, we have all sorts of devices to be able to capture and reproduce sound. In the same fashion, we are trying to capture

and reproduce other types of sound. They're not precisely audible, but they're like existing in a different forms of representation. That's why transduction is so important for a process. So, for us, the idea of interface as the shared boundary through which two or more components of a system exchange information is the basis of these exercises. We create interfaces to other organisms to interact with the human agent in a sonical level. So our hopes is that we can sort of understand, learn something from these other agents by

observing his behaviors, by observing the patterns, by observing their emergencies. And this already is like a very, like a mission for us over these past seven years we're being active. It also implies a point of surface or a space of contact along which there is a potential for interaction. More than interaction, I would like to call it intra-action because it's an action that is already connected. We are already having communication with all these micro cosmos, micro worlds, but we are

unaware of those connections. So the device makes for us tangible that relationship, that level of interchange. So in one part we have the artifacts, we have the language, the methodology and the training as the process to gather knowledge and information from the phenomena we are analyzing. Douglas Engelbert says that the man-machine interface is also a border or coupling through which energy flows when human actions and artifacts actions are exchanged.

So this is quite interesting because at the end we are in contact with our physical world, with the natural world through our devices. That's the way we understand the world outside ourselves by making devices that enables us to get in contact with this complex emergency. Then we have the user, the interface and the cognitive artifact. And Donald Norman says the interface is between a person and a cognitive artifact. devices designed to maintain, display or operate on information performing a representation

function. It's always a level of representation. The devices are not the phenomena itself, not even the most advanced scientific devices. They are only performing the representation of that phenomenon. So this takes us to micro rhythms, one of our exercises. I'm going to try to break the interface of this project apart to show how's the way we develop these ideas and how we couple with these technological processes. So first let's watch a video from

this project in particular and let's listen a little bit of the sounds we create with this. Okay, here is share screen. Okay. So for this project we decide to use again the microbial fuel cells, but in this case we use a lot of them. We create an array of microbial fuel cells.

and connect these microbial fuel cells into a 60-bit array of lamps in order to have a binary flow of information and these lamps are being observed by a machine learning system all the time so the sound it's the result of a process of the machine learning choosing an instrument and the position of the sound in an octaphonic array system in space so what we did was to create the system to give the machine learning the tools to play sound and to leave them alone and i have to say

that this was very um esoterical for us because after two weeks of the exhibition running this happening in medellin in colombia we came back and we were unable to recognize any of the sounds coming out into the system it was our code it was our information it was our design system but what the machine learning was doing already with that was completely out of our understanding in terms of what processes are there performing but it was very evident that some sort of learning process was emerging in between the machine and the bacteria and that was very nice to see

so so first it was very important to be able to have a way to observe all the time and to be able to storage of these observations that's why we decided to work with machine learning to start working with artificial intelligence also because we have this problem in science where the observer influences the phenomena this is something really well known and i think this is one of the big problems of science that just by observing the experiment we are condition creating a condition

for the results which means that we cannot find anything we are not looking for and that's sort of tricky so what happens if we have a non-human representation observing what kind of new emergencies can we expect of that relations and that was the goal of this specific exercise So I'm going to move forward to show you one part here, which is very important. The core of the observation. So here we have a camera seeing the emergence of the lamps. And then this is the actual vision of the computer.

It's just observing the amount of elements that are arising in space. And down here we have the score that the machine learning is created and through those observations. So the score is written by the machine and then this perform at the same time. So that's the main process in this specific piece. So let me stop screen sharing. Oh, sorry, screen sharing. Just a second. Let's go back to the presentation.

We have then the system. So in this case, the system, the functionality is built again first by the things we know about the organisms. We know that they produce a voltage around 200 and 900 millivolts. This is a busy kind of signal. We can map this into a speed on off and number in the case of the lamp arrays. And then we have a camera observing those arrays. We have our computer vision plus machine learning system making analysis, transforming those

into a model to create position, number of synth, choosing of synth and properties of the synth. In this case, we use super collider to create the sound synthesis. And finally, we have the spatialization. The sun is gonna move in 360 or is gonna jump in different ways. All of those decisions depend on the machine learning process. Here we can see a more graphical description of the same map. So the energy goes to operational amplifier, then goes into the analog inputs of microcontrollers, then it's translated into 6-bit array and each array represents a letter.

Then those patterns of letters are storage, analyzed and used to control the instruments and the position of the sounds in space. So we have a generative autonomous system that works totally on the observation process in between the machine and in between the bacteria. We did later a second version of this for our exhibition in the DAD Gallery in Berlin last year. And it was a little bit more complicated version because for that case we also use array of compositional processes. So we use more instruments, virtual instruments, and it was an evolutive process. We decided to do aesthetical relations.

So we start with something we so called noise, and we ended up with some nice ambient rhythmical patterns emerging from the bacteria, because you can also push into that direction if you want. That's the part of the composition process together with those systems. So here again, our bacterial energy source, the vision of the machine. This I showed you before, which is the system score. And here this is a very important part which is the analyzing signals the machine is processing. Every time she finds a pattern, it creates an arrangement of energy, so we can know how much energy is the cells also producing by observing the responses of the lamp arrays.

It's also giving us this functional information in that sense. And then this is the machine pattern distribution. The first step is our guess because you have to guess where are the patterns going to merge. But then the machine it's telling us that we are super wrong. It's not growing in that direction and then it starts storing the actual patterns that are emerging over time. So I think I'm going to run because it's already one hour so fast. So we have here speculative communications. It's also a machine learning system, artificial intelligence and style gang process.

process here we have to build this microscope with an xy position to follow the movement of a specific bacteria which is this beautiful organism called panivasilus these organisms is also performing intelligent tasks and moving in space in different ways i like them when i see it in the petri dish because they look like the sky in a way is like looking to clusters of stars but in a pretry dish and i like those relations when outside or above is the same as below it's like a very beautiful poetical relation so for this we have to create this event classification process

first to understand the different ways the bacteria was organizing itself in a morphological level And after creating this human classification process, we took some time to think about the possible musical interfaces we can create with this organism. So first we talk about the music box, like playing different notes and rotating the disc in a very simple way to create a sort of notation system. Then we design this more complex step sequencer and note position system based on the movement of the bacteria over time.

Then we have another type of sample reverse controlling system by using the rotation of the bacteria as a clock. And I'm going to show you the video for what we have at the end. So with this bacteria we ended up doing a series of performance that we call speculative communications and all of them use the bacteria morphological process as the main system.

That's the bacteria moving on time. Or machine learning, making the analysis of the movement, distribution, relation. Thank you.

So, first, it's very important to show first the material itself, the phenomenon itself, which is a bacteria, as it is with not filters or any transformations. And secondly, our machine learning process or artificial intelligence analysis on top of that, which is the tool that is giving us information to create the compositions. So we show them both in the performative process in real time so we can let know the audience

what's happening in terms of the relation with the bacteria and the machine. Then we designed a second level, which was to use the time lapses to perform three dimensional transformation of the time lapses in order to be able to go inside the bacterial world, which is the next part. so

so the idea is always to immerse the audience into these worlds into the world of the other and And we are able to do this by the combination of the audio visual elements. Sometimes it's only sound. Sometimes we only let the sound to emerge. But we like to show the devices as well as we like to share them. So all of our developments are open source and you can find them in our repository. It's very important.

As I say in the beginning, this Latin American context is a context of sharing, of creating knowledge, putting them together in a space which is understandable even for the non-trained people because we are not scientists, we are not engineers, we are not even musicians, we are just explorers in that sense. We are working with the materiality of these things and this gives us the possibility to learn, to expand and explore in a different way the reality we are immersed in and just to share to finally finish this talk because i think i use more time here so this idea of data driven composition for us is the process of extracting

with data influxes sound reactions to analog and digital generations building a sculpting and modeling zone with the help of the phenomena in this process interfacing and listening is part of the composer's way to choose a narrative for the elements that are evolving on the pieces so it's beyond sonification because sonification focuses only on the literals of the phenomena and sound as a linear way and for us is more the collaborative process of creating something emotional something physical in both ways and i find that this is very connected to the work of

artists like the human intelligence agency in the 90s but created by biosphere and similar projects david took exercises with floppy disk loaded with data to interfere in their compositional processes there were many artists in the 90s trying already these kind of ideas with with the 90s technology We wish much more limited and low file resolution that the data we can process right now because we can use big data, we can develop tools that are even compared to the tools that are being used in universities and so on. So I think it's part of a tradition that's been around for

a long time this this idea of grasping into the unknown this idea of working with the own material and take this bring these things alive is it's something uh that is it's not the first time is explored we we we we think of us as a part of this lineage of sound artists and and yes it's the it's activate sound through the performative of science that's that's what we develop here to create the devices to explore the possibilities and to make sound take the space take time and emerge and to be able to do this we have to think in this way we have to think

as created as a full circle not just as one element we need to think in science terms to explore the perception of nature we need to think in engineering terms to produce and create utility of that perception then we need to think as designers to create behavior of that perception utility and finally we need to express as an art process to create cultural perception process. It's a full circle and that's the circle of artistic research and I will close the session there. Thank you very very much it was really interesting.

So I am very sure there's a lot of questions. I would suggest though that we do take a short break, like 10 minutes. So all of you note down your questions and then we'll meet again for the student presentations and responses and kind of merge that into a discussion. Yeah, so let's meet five minutes to half. That would be 1225 New York time.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, welcome back from this small break. So we have Aladdin and Daniel to do the presentations. Around 15 minutes each. Who wants to be the first one in?

I was I was wondering if it's possible for us to ask some question from Leslie because that was an amazing presentation or you want to wait or what's the what's the plan. I totally agree. I think we'll do the students presentation first and then we'll segue into the discussion afterwards. Aladin, do you want to start? Yeah, I can start. I don't know if Daniel wants to start for me. It's equal. I mean, it won't be 15 minutes, so I guess it would be a bit shorter. Yeah, that's fine. question. Is it fine for you, Daniel? Daniel Kahneman Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I don't mind.

Daniel Kahneman Okay. Yeah, I just did a little overview of the two texts we had to read for the class. So the first one was by Mitchell Akiyama. And the other one was Peter Sinclair. And they both broadly talk about data signification and the race of this use of this method within the hardware in the last decades or so. So both texts are not fairly recent and Sinclair's one is from 2010 and Akiyama from 2014. Sinclair's text is a short introduction, a sum up of a symposium that happened in 2010 and organized by the group called Locus Sonus, who is himself part of it. and the text we had to read was just like a summary of this international symposium.

Akiyama's text is more reflective essay about the use of data sonification in the art world and is proposing a short survey of data sonification in history, we also example of his own work as being an artist as well. So they both seem to converge to a similar definition of data sonification, while Sinclair says and I quote, artists are using sonification to introduce real world or real time elements into their work. And simultaneously Akiyama uses Charles' P. Astriatic semiotic theory and in particular the question of indexial relation between signs and reference. reference so in short the index is a sign which possess a physical relation with its reference

for example smoke is the indexical sign of fire using the example of precursor work of data sonification as for example he used the work of john cage atlas eclipticalis 1961-1962 or Alvin Lussier, Music for Solo Performer was made in 65. So Akiyama says that a work that possesses an indexial relation between the world and an aesthetically oriented output. So that is his definition, I guess, a broad definition of data use of data sonification. While the question of is it really indexical is a bit behind, I think, this presentation here,

however, he gave a good example of what he means by the use of data in art for both authors. The data would help to situate and ground the work of art into the real world via an indexical connection. He is using as an example the artist Andrea Polli and he says, I quote, quote, the groaning and wailing of Polly's installation makes this malaise concrete, discernible, aesthetically immediate. So according to Akiyama, the use of data as unification is tying Polly's work into reality, hence enable the spectator to truly feel, in this case, the ecological crisis. He suggests that data unification can engender

powerful effects contrasting with the cold abstraction of information. And he sees, I say it with his word, that sonic data art is a powerful tool to affect a listener by engendering unexpected relations among events, sites, things in ways that are only possible through computational processes. This is the potential for apparently unrelated bodies concerned to make proximate, to make more proximate to each other. However, for him, in order to, for the emotion and effect to happen, the R quotes as to exceed indexical properties of information and go beyond a simple connection with reality, which

is not enough to affect the listener. But at the same time, it seems that the artists shouldn't go too far in their autorial acts. Both texts come in and in and about the question of the statue of the artist in sonic data art. And it seems that the sonification of data allows to reduce human decision making and reduces autorial presence. About that question, Akiyama is balancing the critic of Manovich about the lack of subjectivity types of artwork. Using the word of another theorist, Szymanowski, Akayama says, I quote, the lack of subjectivity or authorial presence in data art is precisely what is interesting

and important. And it seems that sonic data art is about finding a fine balance between indexical relation and authorial decision between data and the aesthetic outcomes. the same time the Akiyama text tried to address a critique of Adorno and Okaima, dialectic of enlightenment. I'm not sure to have totally grasped according to the text but it seems that their critique of enlightenment, the use of reason statistic which has led to barbarism according to Adorno and Okaima is no longer making sense nowadays. For him this critique became obsolete in the 21st century at the age of big data with this world where the new century

has seen the collapse of information into ever more virtual and seemingly intangible form it seems that for him the capacity of artists to use data collection against itself would prove Adorno and Okaima wrong however the difference between the use of reason and the rise of statistic during an Enlightenment period, which is like Adorno and Ockheimer, don't seem that far from our data-driven society. And here I would just like to introduce a philosopher that I just randomly was reading today, and that makes sense with this question of, according to him, so he's a Korean and German philosopher called Byung-Chul Han, and according to him, Adorno and Ockheimer,

of Enlightenment could be easily applied to what he calls a second Enlightenment, the Adata. And I would just call him to conclude before I open to a question when he says, I will also put the question, the call in the chat, maybe he can help. When he says, the dialectic of Enlightenment holds that the process of illumination that set out to destroy mythology became entangled with every street it made in a mythology of its own. False clarity is only another name for myth. Adorno would say that the transparency of today is another name for myth too. But dataism likewise erals false clarity. The dialectic of old is also

making the second enlightenment which seeks to counter ideology into an ideology in its own right. more still it is leading to barbarism of data and maybe I'll just also read like one of the conclusion of Sinclair test that he was making quite interesting question about when he addresses about the audience perception in data sonification art when he says I quote do they need to know where the data are coming from and yeah I conclude here and maybe we can come back to this question after Daniel the presentation the responder thank you so much yeah let's go to Daniel's presentation yeah I'm going to share my screen yeah oops do you see it

Yes. Yeah. Thank you. So I would like to begin with a very short introduction to sonification. In general, sonification is the use of non-speech audio to convey information or preceptualized data. From Europe, a very early example of using sound as an information carrier could be a Christian church bell, which was commonly used since the seventh century and was carrying information about time and important religions events. One of the earliest examples where modern technology comes into picture could be a Geiger counter from the early 20th century, which is still used today to detect ionizing radiation. For example, if someone enters CERN, he or she has to wear one for simply reasons.

Another exciting example could be a less known device called Optofone. Optofone, this is the picture that I'm showing on the screen. It was designed for visually impaired people. It scanned the text and generated time-varying chords of tones to identify the letters. It was very hard to use and it never gained much popularity, although it looks a very great device to me. Data sonification became essential in our informational age. It is used to enhance user perception of important data when their other senses are occupied, there are no better ways to display the data or it can be also used as an accompanying signal or car beeping to draw our attention to a malfunction or for a phone emitting splashing

sounds to gently trigger us to pick it up and check a notification or a fire line telling us to leave the building immediately. Data come a long way from ancient times where for example it was a gathered astrophysical observation or during the roman empire numbers were used as propaganda in our contemporary society it immersely surrounds us it is collected and used so thoroughly in our everyday life we can almost touch it it describes us it physically changed our brain and while at the same time it can help to gain better understanding about different phenomenals it can also manifest in manifest in Nazi war machines supporting the largest genocide of humanity. The nostalgic

understanding of the artist who is manipulating physical materials to translate thoughts, feelings or to rise attention needs to evolve. In this digital age it is no wonder that contemporary materials, in this case data, is a valid choice when they are searching for new methodologies to work with. I would like to borrow Peter Sinar's framework which he is using to discuss art-related sonification works. I found it a great analytical tool and with his with its help I will focus on Andrea Poli's Atmospheric Weather Works to discuss and discover some of the possibilities offered by sonification for artistic purposes. Just as with works from other conceptual artists like Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, the choice

of the material is essential. The choice of data to be used in sonification is fundamental, it's serving as a conceptual mainstream. Poly's atmospheric water works is an interdisciplinary project in the sonification of storms and other meteorological events generated directly from data produced by a highly detailed and physically accurate model of weather weather system used for research and for request she's collaborated with dr fang nov who was a chief chief of a modern modeling and simulation development branch for the air force's combat climatology center he found a strong tropical hurricane

namely Hurrican Bob, that passed through the same coastal region and they decided to attempt to sonify two storms that have a very different physical structure. Polly puts us in extreme climatic events from 1991, which was one of the costiest hurricane in the USA. Hurrican Bob passed through the densely populated region, millions of people were affected. The first public installation of the project was at the NGIN 27 Gallery, which was a non-profit organization devoted to research, creation and creation of multi-channel sound works in New York City. 16-channel sound installation spatially recreated two historic storms that devastated the New York

Long Island area first through data then through sound. The result is a turbulent and evocative composition which allowed listeners to experience geographical early squared events on a human scale and gain a deeper understanding of some of the more unpredictable complex rhythms and melodies of nature. Engine 27 space had a very specific 16 channel speaker arrangement. They mapped each speaker to a specific point in space proportional to the area spanning from northern Florida to northern New York state and from the eastern tip of Massachusetts to western New Jersey with the New York City situated near to the center. Simulated point data was to be modeled for an

area of approximately 1000 km. This area was mapped to the size of the shape of the Engine 27 space. Atmospheric pressure, water vapor, relative humidity, dew point, temperature and total wind speed data were scaled and translated to Sun and specialized using MaxMSP software. The bank of sound samples you used included vocal sounds, sounds created by wind instruments, and environmental sounds, including the sounds created by various insects. Through her interdisciplinary project, she is trying to promote environmental and social

awareness. They wanted to create spatial sonification of one or more storms that occurred in New York area in the recent past in the hopes that some members of the audience would remember these specific storms. Their other goal was to find out if this notification would yield insight into the nature of these two different types of storms. Some audience members found a metaphorical meaning in the series of rising elevations, finding the composition nearer to the ground to be more visceral, while those compositions representing activity closer to the top of the atmosphere, were felt to be more eternal and spiritual. Meteorologists who heard the work were particularly interested in the specialization of the sound and how the wave patterns of the storm were moving in the space.

The sonification of the rainforest reinforced some known aspects of the particular storms. The winter storm was more intense near to the top of the atmosphere, while the hurricane fastest wind speeds occurred at lower elevations. Yes, with this I would like to conclude my presentation. Thank you very much. So we have two responders, and then Omolu. Yeah, I don't know if Enda wants to go first or not, but I can do it if... Yeah, please go ahead.

Sure, so yeah, I was already familiarized with Leslie's work because I worked on the Novice Frequences which is a in 2015 which she she participated with um a live gig in a workshop um so I had I was helping like mediate the festival I don't know if Leslie remembers that but so so I was the one who had to find like a microscope for her or something like that so I had to borrow it from my school actually. And also I had to call journalists and explain like her work and they just couldn't understand it, but okay, but it was fine. So what I think it's

for me the crucial point of like both the presentations, the texts and the the the leslie's work is the question of transduction with which i think is like the the the most like interesting aspect of sonification because to translate like some sort of material language into sound you have to find this common denominator which can be kind of hard um in this the case of leslie i think it's arduino right it's the material arduino and also like movement for the most part, if I'm not mistaken, like the movement of the cells, even if there are micro movements, right? So there's these hermeneutics of like movement.

But I think there's some problems of transduction in the sense that like pure resonance can't like, it can't necessarily imply a timber or a tone or volume or various characteristics of the the thing that is being sonified and it seems to me like there's always this kind of this gap uh technological gap which is being filled uh like humanly uh through like a cognition right so like an intentional cognition um which is closer to what like villain flusser calls a black box right there's this element of uh there's this an element of indeterminacy that also

is necessarily implied in this process of translation um which means like this is not the sound of the organism itself but is the sound of like the selected media of translation more than the the organism which is fine uh But it's fine because like it, it'd be like dozens of ways, different ways to signify the same thing, right? You can like make a thousand, a dozen different sounds from the same, uh, organism. Um, which I think is interesting is it doesn't take away from the value of the, the, the artistic like endeavor. um i think this it's an interesting like reorientation of generative and stochastic practices

and i didn't know like that leslie was more recently like uh working with uh this sort of mix of uh human uh design and and the technology right because and at the end the last works she presented were already like this symphony is this like uh which was already like designer programmed right and i think this that's very interesting um because it's it's this sort of or speculative legibility of the data um which kind of makes have like an intuitive intelligence of the human agent like making up for the uh mechanic um lack of intelligence that we have

yet uh so yeah i think i think one of the questions of the texts that uh grabs my grabbed my attention most was this question of transduction uh and i found it very interesting how Leslie dealt with it in her like trajectory. Thanks a lot Romero. So Enda. Sure yeah just stop me if I go over 10 minutes I haven't actually like prepared a presentation but I've got a lot of notes so I'm just gonna maybe go through those and yeah I mean I'm gonna say I was a little bit more skeptical and a bit more critical of the thesis of this. And I also want to say that,

like, you know, having seen Leslie's presentation, I think some of that is, I feel like I want to revise or I think that there's kind of a lot more nuance that, you know, the papers didn't really do as much justice to. But nonetheless, I think some of the points still are relevant here. And I guess it kind of comes down to this thing within the art world where increasingly there are a lot of works of art and practices that straddle the border between science and art in a way that's quite interesting and useful in lots of ways. But I think also the switching between registers of science and art can sometimes muddy or

make vague some of the claims that are being made. In this instance, I think the primary issue that I'm having with the project is in its claim to immediacy and its claim to truth. And I think, Leslie, you yourself acknowledged that there's a mediation going on here. So I don't want to say that, I don't want to read it too uncharitably in saying that what the papers are claiming is that there's no mediation, but nonetheless, I think I think there is a certain kind of like, well, okay, so I'll go from the point of view of like what my specific problem is, which is that when it's presented as art, I think it's appealing to an immediate human experience and the cognitive resources of an immediate

human experiences. And the problem with this is, and I'm kind of just taking a line from on the irrationalist kind of philosophy here, that there is a kind of scalar problem where often the data that we're talking about isn't possible to render in terms that are kind of intelligible or that map on in a direct sense to the kind of cognitive resources that we have at the level of experience. So in this way, we have like large sets of data that happen at a different scale that are necessarily unintelligible to human cognition. They are rendered as data and then they're synthesized into sound. And the problem here being when this is presented as science and when this is presented in scientific language, we develop certain kinds of tools

for the interpretation of that data in a way that allows us to kind of understand it not in terms of like the immediacy of our cognitive resources of experience, but by a science basically, but by a kind of a way of interpreting this that is other to what kind of immediately presents itself when we experience things. Now the problem here when it's taken into the kind of field of art is essentially to say that there are certain truths about the data that we're talking about that can be grasped within the kind of existing limitations of our cognitive resources, but the problem there being that in fact when they're not, we're not kind of prompted to redress or develop a kind of modification of those kind of cognitive structures. In a sense, it's kind of

like saying there is some fundamental kind of order that permeates through every single level of the universe and this order is kind of given to experience. But we know from the fact that there are like multiple levels in many different phenomena that need to be kind of analyzed in terms not of just a singular kind of one-dimensional account of function that when we do this, we kind of might elide some very important details. And I think the fact that a lot of these processes take place by way of synthesis is kind of quite telling of the fact that, you know, rather than this being just an analysis of the phenomenon, it is a synthesis. It is kind of it's a projection in a sense of the kind of human psyche onto phenomena that might be in fact recalcitrant to the immediate experience and the logic that we have in this experience of

the kind of phenomena that we're discussing. So I guess to go to some quotes from the text, I mean, I guess like, yeah, so Akiyama says, at their most vibrant artworks are produced from sonified data, create conditions in which the perniciousness of capitalist equivalents might be subverted or undone, engendering empathy or horror, playing on the sound's ability to both modulate mood and function as an intermediary between varying regimes of sensory and experience and information. So here I think this kind of highlights how there's a kind of presumed isomorphic between the data itself and the experience of the data. But in fact, what produces a lot of

these reactions in many cases is the kind of decisions that are being made by the artist. And so in saying that this result of politicized experience of the data is produced by the data itself, I think is incorrect, basically. I think when you make decisions about how to modulate the data in a certain way and present it, this is ultimately the thing that colors your experience of the truth that it's telling. And if you go to the other examples that are provided, for example, there's just a little bit further down one about the kind of the use of data like in the Iraq war and the kind of, I can't remember the specifics of how it worked.

I think the point here to kind of highlight is that in every case we're being provided with a kind of contextual background about what the data means. And that this has like a really strong determination of like how we perceive that data. So it's both the way that it's aesthetically presented, but also the kind of contextual and kind of the theoretical kind of framework that's already applied. And I think that this poses a problem for the idea of a kind of immediacy that can be grasped from the soundification of this data, because we're using our cognitive resources and language and conceptual language in particular to be able to sort of grasp what the meaning of that data is. And this kind of presents or it produces a kind of one sidedness in a sense.

Yeah, so I kind of, there's a lot more than I wrote down, but I think I don't want to like overdo it. So maybe I'll just leave it there and we can just go to questions. But I can clarify anything as well in the questions if people weren't clear. Sure, thanks a lot, Linda. I think we should let Leslie answer that one. Yeah. It's interesting that we can say I tried to find something more related to a data driven composition, which is the actual context of inter specifics work of my work right now, not that much of signification because signification is already. um as you say a problematic field in terms that even working with with scientists in the last few

years even in the science field there is the need of a coloring of the data which is a manipulation of the outcome and that's why i said at the beginning that it was very important to realize that the approach we are taking here is not only from the western philosophical and technological tools we are also working from the latin american perspective and the ancestral perspective and in this case we take account a lot into animism as a way of expressing these materialities in the work as tales of milletus says in some point all is full of gods in in this

case is the idea of trying of embedding the material called apparatus with the flow of energy of meaning of communication that the phenomena has itself we are not looking to tell the truth but we are looking looking to create an ontological experience that lets the audience to create its own truth i'm not saying a specific um a story through my work i'm just creating a relational space in which the audience can create its own experience produce their own knowledge and get certain assertions of questions but mainly we are for the goal of creating questions we want people

to get exposed into these processes and come out out of these spaces with the need to search for their own answers not with an answer itself so the way we present the pieces in the gallery they are presented as experiments of living experiments you can see the organisms you can see the whole process and you can go through each of the stages and you can be there as many times as you want it we change the dynamics of the gallery space in that sense even in the terms of the of the performances and of course today i just um focus on organisms because it's a lot of things to to talk about it but we even are working with the pollution in different cities of the

world to create the experience of pollution and multi-channel installations we've been working with brain waves we were working with several types of phenomena in this case is more about the the phenomena phenomenological content of the signals than the data itself we are trying to go beyond the scientific convey of the data in terms of what this data is telling us i think it's very similar in that sense to to previous works that were made in the science and art intersections where they start working with the microwave signals and radio signals it was not about

the content of those signals it was about the materiality of those signals to be enabled to take them to bend them and to make them into something that we can manage and we can have control same as the fluxus artists did with television television was a one channel communication process and they take the screens and fill the screens with their own content making us capable of imaginary reality where we can transmit and not only be receivers of those levels of information so in this case the material it's a very important element and it's also very political in terms of

the being able to interact with uh information that is usually only for universities for corporations which makes them the centers of power and the centers of knowledge and here we're trying to express the need of seeing this information as a common good and the need for the common audience to be able to interact with those informations to be able to create apparatuses and devices that let them understand that information in their own way. So for us it's a transformative process because where we start from zero in the level of the

apprentice. We want to keep that mind, the mind of the apprentice, the mind of the one that is learning, not the mind of the scientist that already knows everything about the phenomenon and by so is trying to express a truth. We are a level before. searching together for those common truths. Okay let's let's open up for the general debate now. I think I had a question I would just say before we go to that one. If you have questions then please write in the chat that you have a question then then everyone can have a voice. Nima, did you have a special question in mind?

Yeah, I mean there are two actually. One of them is probably close to what Edna talked about, which is like in this, about data, because he also talked about how he's using the data of the dead body in Iraq and making an installation. installation. And I know that there is a whole research about how sound was used for torture in Guantanamo prisons and different ways they tortured these prisoners with sound. And for me, when reading that part of the art here, it was strange that, like how we can reduce these dead bodies and then the tortures to just numbers that is used as data for like performance that was for me knowing about like how the sound has been used in those prisons to torture

prisoners that was a david strange the other question i have from leslie and leslie thank you for this amazing presentation is that what is the role of performer uh as a mediator in the performance because i saw that the two performers and they're obviously altering the sounds and like changing it in some ways at some point i heard some active intervals like a half a step for a whole tone that was changing or some kind of other tone that probably i think it was like added to the original sound of this bacteria or this data that you were using and that of course completely give us give it give us some kind of a different direction to the experience of this experience of the sounds i was wondering how you think about it in that way Yeah, there is two levels. For example, in the case of the installations, there is no

humans present. So we have to leave a complete generative autonomous system running by itself and all the decisions they have to be made by the system. So we try to program a system that is able to distinguish and select in between signals to have a aesthetical outcome that is more or less interesting and when we are performing we do that task so basically we are presented with an amount of information with different sounds that are being processed in real time and we have to choose which of those elements we want to let into the space so most of the time

we are mixing those signals because sometimes you have like a i don't know 20 24 channels with different voices that are representing specific parts of the elements we are analyzing in the organisms or the data in general depending on the piece and then we do a selection of those elements to create a continuity to create some sort of aesthetical experience also we also do the spatialization when is a performatic presence and in the case of the last parts we are working together with the artificial intelligence composer in this case the composer

tell us a recommendation it says like i recommend for this part for you to use one of the following strategies and so we choose one of these strategies and we play together the two of us and the and the machine learning composer that is like directing the piece and it can be infinite because it always have like many options so we have to reduce the amount of time for for this to happen but one time we were like experimenting let's see how long this can run and we stay like five hours following instructions from the same data analysis so what's kind of interesting experience I don't know if that answers the question.

I was just wondering where those pitches and those active pitches came from, the data or you were just using it? All is the data. I don't have like a keyword or like, you know, I cannot change the values, but they have different peaks of information. So sometimes it's a stable and it's going to have like a stable tone and sometimes they start to pick in and when they start to pick in, they're going to have in semi-tone change over time. And sometimes I let that to came into the flux of the performance. Sometimes I restricted it depends a lot on the aesthetics of the performance I'm trying to put together. um we started with a lot of uh noise kind of textures at the beginning like seven years ago

when romolo was in brazil and we were there the performance was actually more spectral ambient noise kind of performance today we have much more control over our system and we can decide and and specific aesthetical style for this it can be even an orchestral composition you You know, you can choose virtual voices like piano and violin, but I find that that is restrictive to put that level of complexity into so restricted instruments. I don't like that that much, but you can do it, of course. So I usually decide for the instruments that let the complexity to be represented

in a more open way. Thank you. Umlu, you had maybe a response to that? No, actually, I meant to respond to end a little bit, like, because I think that Leslie's work is interesting from exactly this epistemological point of view. And I think this is a question of phenomenology, I guess. Like, of course, the sound she's sonifying is not like the truth the true sound of the the organism but i think nevertheless it's a sound from the organism right there's something there there is daily like mediated so you don't have

to like have a claim for truth like you said uh it's just that uh even though that's like highly a highly like um lived like uh or mediated or humanly uh altered a sound it's still like intentionally uh coming from the from the organism which i think is interesting nevertheless and that's why i think the the latter turned into an increase in the role of the human uh in the performance uh it's uh it's kind of interesting because it it sort of like takes away from this more scientific like trying to find the true sound of the of the organism and it's more like let's try to make this orientation of this weird resonance there's that's coming up that we have

red within the the organism and i think that's very interesting um i would like to to say something about this part because like um it's possible as i say at the beginning to develop some sort of system um to be able to listen to the organism itself um but what you end up listening is again a lot of influences from the outside space so that's why we decide for a more like a performative of the organism over a system so the idea is to let the the different expressions

of some organism to take over our system and perform with this system so this is grounded on second level cybernetics where a system is the level of influences in between each of the elements that combine inside the system being the organism the trigger of this whole programmatic process and the instrument the reflective space where the organism puts its intention so we are influencing the organism the organism is influencing the instrument the instrument is creating a sound that's the same time is influencing the spectator so we are inside this second level cybernetic

experience sequence where everything is part of the interconnected process that we are experiencing Somebody has another question or something that wants to concerns, doubts. Yeah, Enda, please go on. Yeah, sure. I mean, like I say, I wasn't, you know, I can understand, I'm not saying

that the project, especially the project that you presented is like completely devoid of merit or has like, I mean, I actually, I really enjoyed the, like the videos you showed us and everything. I guess my skepticism is about like the theoretical framework that's being presented more so than the, like the kind of artistic merit of the work, which, you know, Again, I enjoyed it. But I guess, yeah, just going back to the previous point about wanting people to construct their own ontological kind of view or to better understand, because the kind of scientific discourse and framework is not available to people, we just want them to kind of like project their own kind of view onto things. And I think that's fine to a point.

But at the same time, I think that the situation which that is not accessible to people is a lamentable situation in a sense. And I think that partly, you know, what this work kind of, how I like to interpret the work or what I was kind of experiencing when you were showing me was to try and like resist this attempt to like discern patterns within the work and actually kind of maybe that can be both a reflection on the kind of the limitations of our ability to understand what's going on, as well as a kind of understanding of the technologies themselves that are being used to synthesize this as a kind of, you know, like to kind of evaluate their kind of attempt in a sense. I'm not sure, but yeah, I mean, I just feel at the same time, you know, it can become

in a way I guess like pernicious to assert that like the patterns that we discern in certain kind of events that aren't necessarily communicating with us but we're kind of trying to yield a communication from them I'm not saying this is a kind of a form of cruelty or something because I don't think it is but at the same time we need to recognize this kind of like one-sidedness and also the fact that we're using a conceptual framework and a kind of of an apperceptive framework, I guess, to like discern these patterns and rhythms, which fundamentally then register them in human terms and in terms that makes sense in terms about like history. You know, we would be better not to get the wrong idea about what we're seeing, in a sense, because at a certain point, then this kind of it does it does imply

a species narcissism in a way. And I'm not saying that this is what you're doing or like, you know what the project is or anything. But I think that it is like a potential like uh consequence um if we don't if we don't kind of like think about this both in terms of the way that it negates us as well as the way that like it is positing something um so yeah i mean that's kind of just maybe i don't it doesn't quite respond to what romano was saying but maybe kind of tangentially is addressing it also yeah yeah i find it uh interesting because um at the end the main goal is human perception expansion it's like what we're trying to say is that we can expand our level of understanding of reality through the tools we are designing ourselves

technology at the end of the day is it's a way a human creative response to our inability to grasp into many areas of the complexity that reality is so in that sense we are just trying to use this these same tools to interconnect a human with other levels of reality that are emerging in the same space as we are but we are incapable of perceiving and just by opening this door of possibility that we can be able to be in contact with this otherness i think that's already like the goal for us just this this we can cross this space

we can open that door and we can be not self-concern into the human perception of everything but we can try to start finding ways to intercommunicate on a conceptual on a symbolical level with this otherness that is around us and maybe by these observations we can start learning something else about our own selves because of course it's always the same problem we communicate to language so language is already a limitation for us to perceive other types of communication if we think that communication is only language based then it's already restricting ourselves to a very specific ground but if we see communication from the engineering perspective every signal

that is transmitted it's a communication space every transmission of net of energy contain contains information and by so it has the possibility of communicating through this information so in a way it's just like um trying to play with these elements trying to put them in an arrangement that can create this space of interspecies interchange Is there anyone who hasn't posted a question who wants to ask something?

Otherwise I would like to ask a question myself. So you showed a small clip from the live performance speculative communication. was you you you the two of you you were standing uh playing music like as a musical performance and then in the background you could see this a material that you're working with i think that was the the bacteria right yeah um but the the the sound part of it was very musical to me like it's i think it's one of the most musical like if you understand music as in in traditional senses it was one of the most traditionally musically sounding pieces.

There must have been some choices you've been taking in order to create that kind of musical space and not a kind of more experimental space, I mean experimental musical space. Maybe you have some comments to it. Yeah, first of all, the instruments we created for speculative communications. If you can see the bacteria does this rotational movement and each rotation has a different rhythmical pattern and timing. So we use that to create different clocks and we can connect rhythmical clocks, melodical and different more musical elements into those observatory processes.

So we end up with a very, very traditional electronic compositions out of those exercises. And we decide to leave it in this way because we also have a series of invitations for festivals like um mutec in montreal and mexico and buenos aires and we wanted to to have a space to present these for a not specialized specialized audience because usually when we present um electroacoustic experimental electronic music the amount of audience is delimitated to a very specific group and we decided to take a shot and experiment into what these new generations are listening to and

were experiencing into electronic music and we created two albums out of these experiments one is speculative communications and the second is 80x which is the second performance and both of them have a influence from ambient to industrial techno and all depends on the data sets we are using so we create an interface for this that shows different elements maybe i will share my screen again to show this sorry so you can have a very idea of the interface uh so this interface is like um like a sequencer um cassette player you can call it different ways

okay i'm sharing here here we go just one second here's one example So over here, this like an 8-bit representation is a topological reading from the time lapses. these topological readings are creating different flows of signal data. And by using CV tools in Ableton,

we are sending these CV signals into the modular. And we're controlling different aspects in the modular, clocks and melodical patterns, rhythms, and so on. And over here, just give me a second to get there to change you can see the spikes on the readings and those spikes are like on and off signals that can be triggered into a drum matching for example and you can transpose depending on the amount of values on those on and off to

figure different elements on the instrument so here we have a more standard compositional instrument that at the end is working with the same characteristics of the material You can have, for example, this version. to create sort of harmonical

chord generative sequences so we're being experimented a lot also in this part of how to use the language of traditional music into our own processes but then we also have other elements that break those apart completely and i would like to make an invitation for you right now and november is going to be presented a new piece for inter specifics in the hakavi so if you are in berlin you can go there if not we're gonna have this radio over here which is a ai generative radio and it's a completely artificial intelligence neural network that is based on the most consumed

music on stream platforms so we are sort of like analyzing the processes of the stream platforms and create a full full plunder phonic acuzmatic cyber surrealistic process out of this and this is nothing to do with bacteria or other stuff but is the phenomena of human listening to algorithms and algorithms producing with those rules so it's also very musical but it's going to be very glitch and very broken because that's the the exercise about it's like um taking those neural networks

and feed them with the whole data analysis from all these genera that people is listening right now in commercial terms so this is like a sort of a photograph of human taste right now because of the way algorithms are manipulating our way to listen to music especially those that relay on recommendations on stream platforms. Maybe not us because I think you will be the ones that have their own searches and methodologies to find the music you listen to. I think we have like five minutes left. Maybe one last question if someone sits

on their friendships. OK, if not, then it's also been a dense session. There was one question that I had to answer from James. Let's see. And it's about the seminars project parameters for if you can do an essay or create a project. I have to come back to you with that.

I just have to ask the organizers from the new center. There are some. I think it's in the student's book somewhere. But I'll ask them directly what the possibilities are. Okay, thanks. Okay, do you, Leslie, do you want to have a final word? Well, maybe just if you have some time, you can visit the website for interspecifics.cc. I'm going to put it here. So you can check some other projects and if you have some time off, so please visit our

SoundCloud page. We have all the exercises and experiments over there. Our work is not all about bacteria. You will find other experiences different from this. We work with bacteria humans phenomena and and also we have this line of techno shamanism that you will find interesting maybe you can give it a try and i would say like um the interesting part for me as a sound artist living in this century is the possibility to pursue what it was a fiction for the people in the past we can make it now real we have the tools to make this a reality and

it's really thrilling to see how all these ideas from all these scientists and thinkers are now being uh habitating the same space as we are and independently if it's a search for any specific reasoning or finding a way of true or a way of coming around and thing is very important to find that we can have now the ability to work at the same level as the ones that have the information and the knowledge for them because we can open it for everyone and that's very important part of the open source communities and that's why it's

important to make it sound because at the end sound is one of the most powerful tools that we have every culture has a way to work around sound every culture has a tradition on sound it's it's our first language is our first technology so i don't know it's just fascinating Thanks a lot for your presentation and for being here. It's been really, really fascinating diving into your specifics works. So I'm looking very much forward to go visit HACAVI in November. Thank you. For the next seminar, we have Steve Goodman.

And he's very prepared on audio virology. So there's kind of a connection to bacteria and sonification of that kind. So he's kind of bridging that with his work on sonic warfare. There's a good segue into that. So I'm looking very much forward to that. The material for that session will be sent out either today or tomorrow. All right. And as always, if you have any questions for me, just send me an email, and I'll do my best to answer them. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

Thank you, Leslie. Thank you.