Entanglements (SOIL)2026, HD Video, 12:30, Stereo
What lurks in the breaths between beats is rendered visible by a sympoetic exchange, a waltz with the gaps between the leaves;
An interative, multi-variable media project spanning across single-channel video, sound, and live performance.
Pulling conceptually from Donna Haraway’s notions of the “cyborg” (a hybrid of machine and organism). In that same vein, she defines “sympoesis” as “making-with”; describing how nothing is self organizing, nothing makes itself.
This project started as an exploration of those concepts. I had discovered artist Jez Riley French’s Secret Sound of Trees, wherein French built contact microphones which he then hammered into trees. I built a few piezo mics of my own and experimented with pressing them in between bark, under the soil..
This eventually led me to discover that you can hear the sound of one tree by tapping another, which for me brought up the idea of a “network”.
A few iterations outdoors later, I introduced wireless Arduino micro-controllers, the ESP-32. By hooking up sensors to these and connecting them via ESP-NOW (a wireless protocol), I could have the data from these sensors, connected to plants or under the soil, send readings into either VCV Rack, or MAX, which I used to create the audio and visuals for this project.
So far, the project has taken a number of versions, each “iteration” different than the last.
Variations