Levántate (Rise)

Description of the project

“Levántate” is an interactive audiovisual installation rooted in the concept of artificial life inasmuch as it is a reflection on artificial death. In this art project the dissolution of the limits between life and death are being constantly modified.

All the elements in the installation space are interconnected and thought of as parts of an artificial death system. 2 computers, 2 electronic hearts connected in a permanent transfusion of data, are being fed live sounds from a microphone hidden in the darkness that captures the momentum of the present. Its live input is used by both computers to process in real-time what is seen and heard.

When entering the installation, the only source of light the spectator can see is the electronic image of a female body in a perpetual state of digital decomposition that is projected on the physical symbolic representation of a dead body: a sarcophagus.

The projected body never ceases to decompose, there is never a beginning (an intact body) nor an end (the disappearance of the body). There is no starting point, no conclusion, no possible miracle that will rise the body from the dead… only change… transmutation… decomposition… recomposition and transformation.

This process of undying disintegration is created in real-time by the image processing computing heart and it’s nurtured, artificially sustained ‘alive’ through the sounds present in the space.

The second computing heart is processing in real-time an algorithmic computer music composition that provides a constant stream of digitally decomposed voices in the installation space. Mixed into this ever changing sonic texture is a unique audio feedback interactive system that re-records its output together with the presence of the audience. By using the microphone to capture the verbal resonances of the public and recycling them as new source materials for acoustical deterioration, the human emotional element is also injected into the sound computing system.

As spectators, we are witnesses who, at the same time, become a part of the interactive system. If we move or speak in the installation space, the decomposing body will subtly respond to our noises and voices and, in time, we will hear our own voices mixed into the computer music composition, slowly decomposing and dying.

As the microphone continues to pick up live sounds and sending them to both computers, as the computer music interactive composition continues to incorporate the live sounds and decomposing them, as the body’s disintegration subsists on digesting all live data input, the installation becomes a never ending, ever changing, metaphor of death.