in|fibrillae (2021)
A hybrid audio-visual poem for the browser and a physical installation. Composition of sound and digital image: Hanns Holger Rutz. Text: Nayarí Castillo.
This piece is a reconfiguration of an audio-visual installation into a hybrid form that can either be experienced in an online browser space, or through a small scale physical installation consisting of a square format framed screen along with a transducer projecting sound onto a glass surface, such as a window pane. It is loosely based on the previous piece in|filtration, unravelling it into hundreds and thousands of small fibres, in order to transpose the original materiality for a personal space.
in|fibrillae (dry excerpt - listen through laptop speakers)
The piece is based on exchange between otherwise disconnected and “uncommunicative” segments, departing from forms of spatiality: the distinction between a common space and an individual (or inner) space. The common is a repertoire of shared topological forms for sound structures. It is individuated through automatically programmed synthetic sounds, yielding the distinct corpora of virtual sub-spaces. The pure sonic layer is complemented by a layer of animated digital image and text fragments. The images are based on wax paper prints taken from cut tree branches in Caracas in 2008. After many years, I am now returning to them, and the close-up of the images replaces the fabric of in|filtration in its fragility, as adumbration of the membrane. The bulge that the trees regrow around the cut produces a boundary surface in its own right, which can be explored in the digital image.
Several variants of the drawings, sound corpora and poems are part of the piece, the “layers” or virtual sub-spaces that are arranged in a carousel like manner. The poems are sets of words that belong together, making reference to different concepts of spatiality, they appear in dynamic permutations, as objects that transcend the semantic level and move around on the surface, but are constrained inside the trunk drawings. A fixed zoom scale is used to restrict the view to a part of the image and highlight the texture of pixels. One may move the view port around, either using the mouse pointer in the browser, or by triggering proximity sensors placed around the physical installation along with an agent that wanders around in the virtual space.