CEREUS
radical encounters in acoustic ecologies.
CEREUS are deeply thinking about the tensions and intersections in visual sonic space that reflects the plant world, plant behaviour and the often-violent reality of our human relationship to nature. To speculate on the collisions between nature, science, technology; especially in the context of the current ecological collapse, social and political polarizations, moral crises and technological submission is political.
As sound artists, we are drawing from speculative fields such as physics, biology, abiogenesis, evolution, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, and somatechnics. We are observing, investigating and prompting large language models, deep learning processes through interactive design to study plant behaviour a little deeper and encourage, create new interactions in audio-visual immersive environments.
We will be focusing on the role of ‘breath and bodily movement' as an awareness: the lungs of our existence and the way that plants breathe with us and for us. What can we learn from this exchange and what we take for granted is also a contemporary reflection or shared understanding for "unbreathable conditions" and our vulnerabilities because not to breathe is when we start asking whose lives count as lives, be they human or non-human.
artist residency: (re)mote sensing, (re)growth, (re)wilding where the wild things are in Nea Livera, Peloponnese region, Greece.
In a recent artist residency in greece, CEREUS collected a new sound bank of local flora, 3-D lidar scans, drawings, captured body movement in the landscape and topographical virtual mapping as new speculative research .
CEREUS approached this project as a 'queering ecology' of space in relation to the natural world. We share a love of biology, nature rights, the land, and our collective futures. We consider the broad category of nature and imagine a world that prioritizes animism, indigeneity and other embodied, queer speculations and more-than-human ecologies.
This research-creation process explored the possibility of finding a creative critical stance towards non-human forms that surround us. Where the wild things are.
We undo various divides—the divide between art and science, refined and popular art, pure and applied, vibratory and visible, individual and social, inner and environmental practices. The digital archive, is a way of looking towards a speculative future since the plants we study may not be around in the near future.
We were also developing an understanding of the inner structure of the body in relation to plant life and the complex interplay between all systems (nervous, vascular, digestive, endocrine, emotional and psychological) of the body/mind relation. This research in combination with electronic modular sound and somatic movement, we hope, will develop a performative language in the field of relations with bioacoustics and the prosodic body: one that supports an intuitive exploration of the dynamic between internal and external kinaesthesia..
.Field Work documented by Juliana España Keller in residence:. Nea Livera, Greece (Nov. 2024).
Image above: a 3D scan OR 3D photogrammetry of a female and male kiwi vine.
The 3D model images documented below are images generated with precise LiDAR scans, and capture immersive 360° data and AI augmented blueprints to create a nomadic cartographic mapping of the natural world.
Points of contact field work. a photographic reflection of the skin of a human to plant skin. Plants epidermis is similar to ours. They breathe, vibrate and think through their skin. A leaf sample from a house fern.
The audio-visual work above started as a video capture of an ancient olive tree in Nea Rivera, Greece. The audio track was then processed in Montréal by Alex Pépin to reflect the soul of this tree through plant capture recordings to communicate that these ancient beings live and breathe as we do going forward into the Anthropocene.
THERE IS SOME STRANGE INTIMACY BETWEEN GRIEF AND ALIVENESS, SOME SACRED EXCHANGE BETWEEN WHAT SEEMS UNBEARABLE AND WHAT IS MOST EXQUISITELY ALIVE.
Alexandre Pépin has been playing classical music instruments since he was (15) years old where he went on to form his first band and performed his first public event. At (18) years old, he recorded his first album. He has recorded albums and toured with different musicians such as Canadian folk artist, Joseph Edgar, traveling all over the world for (9) years. He still works with the Queer rock band, "Samuele" and has accompanied them on tour since (2010) through Canada, France and Switzerland. The most recent recording was released in September (2023).
"Cereus" is a collaborative project that he shares with Dr. Juliana España Keller that explores acoustic ecologies of the Anthropocene.
Juliana España Keller, PhD is a Canadian/Swiss/British sound and performance artist engaged in radical entanglements with modular synthesis in sound art through speculative research. Juliana is interested in fluctuating sites with sensing subjects and tactile experimentation within participatory practices.
"capturing sound as a practice of sensing".
"we are in the world and the world is in us".
In her feminist new materialist practice, she uses simple electronic processes to observe different materialities of sound. She places electronic components which includes sensory stimuli in different situations of intra-action with the body. She experiments with organic materials, kitchen tools and appliances, and environmental stimuli. From these collisions, synthesized sounds emerge to create collaborative narrations or sonic recipes and observations that she observes as radical entanglements in the natural world.
Juliana's latest journal article published by Open Cultural Studies, DeGruyter Open Access Publishing Press. (2024).
ICAROS on SoundCloud.
Peligro 19, Villanueva del Rosario (Malaga). August 2024. Visuals on Touch Designer: Emilio Mula. Photo documentation courtesy of ©luciavegas2024
cereusnature
Activating a sonic relation by humans with non-human beings (plant life) as an electronic conduit with machines (electronic hardware) is a musical exploration in novel contrasts of communication. This work in progress explores the possibility of finding a creative critical stance towards non-human forms that surround us. Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of (50-120 Hz) as audio acoustic emissions and may embody an internal meridian system. Vibrating at this internal frequency, plants create sound matter quite possibly when in pain or suffering. This affective sound matter, which is not audible to human ears, can be heard by non-humans such as bats, mice, and other plant life too.
keywords: Acoustic Ecologies, Bioacoustics, Radical Affection, Environmental Humanities, Multi-Species, Speculative Inquiry, Symbiosis, Anthropocene, Posthumanism, The Biosphere.
"Le plateau des miroirs", PHI Foundation, Montréal, Quebec, Canada (2024).
immersive landscapes
The ability to listen to plants through technology or 'cybernetics' is to transcend the idea of an electronic signal as a transformative medium in art creation. The multi-channel audio system reveals sonically a plants inner life through a plant's ability to transmit electromagnetic pulses. To think about communication in terms of electrical signaling is no longer thought of in exclusionary, human-centered ways.
The sound piece can be perceived as a 'deep listening' meditation and requires your full attention. Please lie down and feel comfortable and immerse yourself in a multisensory ode to the planetary transformations unfolding all around us. The voices gathered from different plants will orient us as the world we have known comes undone and new configurations begin to take shape as we are experiencing the throws of the climate emergency.
ROTA FESTIVAL, Centro Negra AADK, Blanca, Murcia, Spain (2023).
PHI FOUNDATION, Montréal, Québec, Canada (2024)
A PLANETARY STATEMENT ON THE PRACTICE OF ART
In an age in which we are increasingly conscious of planetary interconnections – on environmental, social and biological levels to name just a few – and in a world increasingly divided on political and economic levels, how do we communicate across borders and boundaries and give voice to communities? Small actions create big effects, interdisciplinary interaction, transdisciplinary practice/s that move away from systems of power that are more vast than any one individual. How, perhaps might we maintain a sense of agency within this paradigm? How might we tell stories about these vast systems? And what kind of planetary stories should we tell?