2023
SOFIAN AUDRY
TEZ
Italie / Amsterdam
MARCH 05 → APRIL 23
Xenolalia is an art-science installation exploring computational and biological sentience through a feedback loop connecting an artificial neural network with a colony of microalgae to create a speculative living alphabet.
The alphabet emerges through an iterative morphogenetic process. The neural network projects a glyph onto a Petri dish. Drawn to the light, the microorganisms move toward the shape, acting like a living photographic substrate. Their image is captured and fed back to the network, generating a new glyph. Over time, a hybrid biological-computational symbol gradually takes form.
Displayed at micro, meso, and macro scales, the work invites curiosity and imagination. Visitors witness a unique form of communication between biological and computational agencies, exploring a speculative language they must interpret.
On this metamorphic stage of human, non-human, biological, and computational entities, the audience is encouraged to rethink language, perception, meaning, and sentience from a non-anthropocentric perspective. The installation hints at future interactions between computational, carbon-based, and even xenobiological entities.
Biologiste : Nishad Jayasundara
Assistants : Etienne Montenegro (code, électronique, fabrication), Guillaume Cramoisan (fabrication), Matthew Loewen (code), Ian Donnelly (biologie), Brynn Yarbrough (biologie)
Soutien : Conseil des Arts du Canada, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Mondriaan Fund, Hexagram, Université du Québec à Montréal, University of Maine
Sofian Audry explores hybrid agents at the intersection of art, artificial intelligence and artificial life. The artist creates fragile, adaptive systems that blur the boundaries between nature and technology, biology and computation, human and machine. This experimental practice subverts traditional technoscientific frameworks by unsettling the role of technology as a tool of control, redistributing agency between humans and non-humans to reveal the precarious humanity of machinic and living agents, while inviting the public to question its own non-human character.
TeZ (aka Maurizio Martinucci) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. TeZ explores the boundaries between human perception and the full range of physical phenomena associated with vibration. He designs generative software and custom instruments for the propagation of sound and light, as well as site-specific architectural structures in which subtle oscillations can reach the body and induce meditative, immersive experiences.