A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains.

2023

Atractor + Semantica​​

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Golden Nica Ars Electronica 2023​

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‘A Tale of Two Seeds’ is a sound installation that explores the expansion of technical agro-industrial colonisation in Colombia. We use subterranean and surface recordings of the soil and recordings of electrical conductivity in the soy and amaranth plants to present a sonic testimony of the changing sounds of the Andean landscape.

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This work explores the complex and invisible relationship between transgenic soy and amaranth. Before being labelled a parasite, amaranth was a plant that occupied a valuable and sacred place in the lives of many indigenous peoples. The transformation and loss of Latin American crop ecoacoustic soundscapes is a living testimony to soil degradation and the destruction of all the relationships that make up terrestrial biotic ecosystems. We used data capture, recordings and sonification technologies to make a sound case study of Colombian agricultural soils before, during and after the advent of soy expansion in the eastern plains region of the country, as well as the emergence of amaranth in the current agricultural technology scene.

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The data collected from the plants comes from micro variations in plant conductivity, which led us to think of an electronic micro landscape. To sonify this, we decided to use the collected data as if it was a modulator of a granular synthesiser that directly cuts and rearranges micro fragments of electrical anomalies captured by radio antennas. This reveals the information flow of the electrical impulses from the plants as complex layers of electromagnetic noises. We also used recordings taken from above and below the monoculture and polyculture soils with a variety of microphones and a device which measures the interference of radio wave signals passed through the soil.

 

 

 

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