about cereus
CEREUS is interested in quantum listening—thus revealing the instrumental, microtonal, electronic forces and intensities of phenomena brought into a broader architectural space through a mind-body relation..
We are making observations through a quantum entanglement to listen deeply from a minimalist position—the timbre, texture, tuning/temperament, psychoacoustics, harmony, inharmonics of plant communication, to explore broader theories and texts in the phenomenology of plant life (the study of direct experience).
Juliana and Alex are working together to create acoustic ecologies of the anthropocene as a transversal site for building resilience in ecological continuity, community building and story-telling in acoustic ecologies. We aim to listen to plant sounds as a metarelation that forms an ecology. We find sonic expression in many different fields that characterize a soundscape, which are a potential form of bioacoustics.
interactive art installations
We are deeply interested in the creation of interactive art installations that are geared towards listening and learning about our relationship with the natural world. We use audio information or perceptualize sonification data through a 3D spatialized visual design architecture. Auditory perception has advantages in temporal, spatial, amplitude, and frequency resolution that opens possibilities to an alternative or a complement to contemporary audio-visual installations.
methodologies
We use sensors with plants to capture a live sonic intra-relation with a plant in concert as an ongoing exploration wired into the world of Modular Synthesis.
We are inspired to bring a sense of space and depth to our generative audio mixing concepts and use spatial audio design as a perceptual immersive mixing tool.
We are using an inventive way of mixing where you intuitively position objects in experimental spaces and let the acoustic signature of the room build the desired depth of listening directly to the viewer.
We wish to create acoustic space (reverberation) that recognizes the 'aliveness' of plant life so as to place the significance of plants as individual beings and sentient life.
Most importantly we recognise that different cultures (specifically Indigenous cultures worldwide) do not share the Western humancentric position of the inferiority of plants and nature as a lifeless resource for exploitation, but rather see nature as possessing more-than-human intelligence.
CEREUS makes perceptible to the human senses—the slow, subtle intra-active relations of other-than human physical undulations from plant life. We do not rely on science alone, we are interested in the intra-relation of vegetal matter-technicity-human phenomenology and the forces and intensities of biological, cosmological phenomena, other than stated within the laws of physics (Isabelle Stengers and Bruno LaTour).
The sensors that issue small signals through the plant, measure variations in electrical resistance between two points within. The variation in the connection is largely related to how much water is between those two points, which changes a lot as the plant is moving water around while it's photosynthesizing, That fluctuation is graphed as a wave, and then into pitch.
These pitch messages are coming from plant life. The pitches from vegetal matter then enter a modular device's software, which then feeds into various synthesizers for the plants to "play".
A musical score is generated by algorithms and vegetal matter through our modular system. We overlay our sounds on top of these sounds in Ableton Live coming from our sonic hardware.
indigenous perspectives
As Sound Artists, we use technology as a tool to place human and non-human into a dialogical relationship, where both voices are equal despite perceived differences.
The audio data collected by various plant life forms are the foundation of a number of audio-visual artworks that materialize this data both independently and with other living beings.
The goal of the CEREUS project is to create artworks generated by the different spatial environments that will simultaneously express the complexity and liveliness of plants in a symbiotic relation, to allow the public to engage in a immersive experience.
CEREUS is involved in the creation of sonic media artworks at the intersection of art, science, Indigenous world views and technology. The audio-visual artworks that Juliana and Alexandre create are speculatively and poetically created using a multimodal storytelling as a vehicle for interpreting, mattering, and embodying more-than-human ecologies. The goal is to critically and emotionally engage with vegetal matter while being reminded that the importance of de-centering the human, even while the viewer and the sound creators are human, we are all one in the biosphere.