A vague sense of presence is a symbiosis between individual sounds and its encompassing aural field.

Each of the composers followed the path they desired, culminating in a work that reflects its particularities and likenesses. By linking all the parts, the path converged into a single point, a centre.

As a collective, the parts make up the whole. The individuality, although present and symbolized by each one of the speakers, is diluted. In the implied volume created by the structure, a space of communion and contemplation emerges, surrounded by sound.

Each composition is generative, as well as the transitions between themselves. Using a probabilistic system and the intrinsic internal compatibility of the unique elements of each composition, the complete work is composed.

Interactive and generative installation.

This is an abstract visual representation of a generative and evolutionary ecosystem with real time sound synthesis.

It explores the core concepts of group behaviors and family bonds, and also the struggle to survive. It starts with individual beings that form families over time, eventually leading to the survival of the strongest ones. 

The user can play the role of God, interfering in the ecosystem through feeding, killing or breading.

In constant movement we sink, in the foam of never ending tides we sink. Like drowning in the waves, like floating again and again in the same stream.

A never ending feedback, that will not let us escape, and that will follow us, as we are following it.

We find no silence in the rolling rips. We just drown.

The interactive soundinstallation is consisting of four loudspeakers positioned in the middle of a room, facing outwards to the walls. Througout the room, circled around the speakers, 6 glasses with different amounts of water are placed on sockets, mirroring the continuous tide movement of the ocean as well as the source of the sounds. As a maximum of two people enter the installation, a generative 4-channel sound composition is played from the four speakers. With the help of a webcam the movement of the visitors is controling a lowpass filter , which is opening and closing according to the degree of movement in the room. The sound will therefore be experienced fully, only if the visitors are moving within the installation space. This way a constant dynamic of sound and physical interaction is established. All of the sounds of the composition are originating from recordings of waves, tide and further water activity, by which the fundament of the whole loop-based piece is created, speaking as a metaphor for the infinite repetetive movement within our world and the constant flow within ourselves, even though being sensible to interruptions and distortions.

Giaco.bot is an autonomous drawing machine, which functions as an extension of the artist, and represents through kinetic movements to the human being.​

Hypercube is an interactive audio-visual artifact that allows its users (individually or in group) to manipulate the output of the installation. The project aims to explore joint participation and sound experience in a three dimensional graphic environment. It was developed in the Graphic Design and Multimedia course of the School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha - ESAD.CR.​

RADA™ is a robotic music ensemble integrated in the LOAproject developed by the Lucifer’s Ensemblecollective. LOA is a reflection over Haitian and Louisiana Voodoo, bridging art, anthropology, the experimental and the ancestral. The starting point of research begins with the works of the choreographer, dancer, writer and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, such as the Religious Possession in Dancing and Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. 

                  Rada is a set of Loas (deities) and rites that descend from the Kingdom of Dahomey (presently Republic of Benin), using in its cerimonies the Rada battery - an ensemble comprised of a family of three drums made out of carved wood and a membrane made of cowhide: the manman (the biggest drum), segon (medium drum)andboula(smallest drum). Where the drummers role in such rites is to both stimulate and interact with the possession of the participants, said to be ‘mounted’ by the Loas. 

            Voodoo, as an ancestral religion, has been under constant mutation over the ages, exhibiting different artefacts and mixed cultural expressions spread around several countries such as Haiti, Benin, Togo, Cuba or Brasil, just to name a few. Likewise, RADA™ is not a robotic emulation of the Rada battery and percussionists but rather a unique robotic ensemble inspired by Rada drums and the rhythmic patterns used in its rites. It aims to explore the relationship between music and trance states, using generative music algorithms to generate long duration performances based on transcriptions of a set of musical patterns dedicated to given Loas (such as Legba or Samedi), posing the question: how can automatons induce us into trance-like states ?

Rainforest is an interactive audio-visual installation where a virtual universe of autonomous entities evolves in time and space following a set of pre-determined rules. Each entity has a visual and sonic representation and multiple entities can agglomerate to form new ones, which in turn generate new visual and sonic representations. The global evolution of the virtual system is governed or influenced by the behavior of the audience that travels throughout the exhibition space.​

SYNSPECIES is an audiovisual project inspired by virtual ecologies – unstable morphological spaces that emerge from an interaction of co-existing entities with the void. SYNSPECIES are multi-scaled audiovisual objects that are cross pollinating, mutating, adopting and fighting for their space and existence. They co-create a world of unreal physicality that is constantly kneaded by violent forces. Their existence appears to us as fractured narratives resembling a chain of synchronised chaos.

SYNSPECIES feed on tangles made by computer-based code and analogue signals. They originate from Stockholm’s EMS modular systems, algorithmic composition and 3D geometry synthesis. The vivid abstract architectures of SYNSPECIES fluctuate in an ambiguous pulsating time hybridising and shaping new spaces confined in a perpetual disintegration process. SYNSPECIES encircles a serie of audiovisual performances and installations. The installation Spaceless Latitudes portrays the first work of the serie.

CREDITS:

Elías Merino: Music

Tadej Droljc: Visuals

EDIGMA SEMIBREVE AWARD WINNER

Steam & Steel is a Virtual Reality experience, an interactive simulation, in which the authors recreate the environment and activity of a train repairer in the XIX century, in an immersed form. The project was developed in the Master in Engineering and Development in Digital Games, at IPCA.

 

The suspense that is felt between the moment of beginning of construction of the image and the appearance of the result is ruled by the expectation of the unexpected. I sought to domesticate chance. This is not the arbitrariness or the chaos, but the control of the conditions that favour the emergence of unforeseeable events; that is to say, it seeks to create a formal process with restrictive conditions that, nevertheless, can produce unpredictable results at the aesthetic level.

The creative act stems from the tension that arises between the use of chance as renunciation of authorship, and the control of the machine as search for authorship. This tension manifests itself in the incorporation of chance, the contingent, the indeterminate, and the random, on successive levels incorporating chance and randomness: from the a priori conception of individual graphic marks, through the development of bugs, to the mathematical-geometric parameterization of computational pseudorandom. The instruction is part of the work. It is the work, inaccessible to the viewer. The system is the work of art.

Exhibition that shows some of the pioneers of Portuguese video art, namely the collective Videoporto.