STUFF CHANGE
multisensory installation2024

artists and scientists in residence at ligeti center
s+t+arts resilence

denisa půbalová
lea luka sikau

exhibitions:
ligeti center vernissage 27.09.2024
ArtSearch 2024

Everyone emits and has heard bowel sounds. Nonetheless, their metabolic acoustics remain stigmatized; their sonic richness is often silenced. stoff wechsel / látková přeměna is a multi-sensory installation exploring the acoustic and haptic quality of gut feeling. It brings our guts into collective resonances and viscerally encourages them to synchronize with each other. stoff wechsel / látková přeměna sounds out how we can attune to one another, not via breath or heartbeat, but through our gastrointestinal systems - asking to get closer to yourself, think outside your own rationality and to experience your body as an ecological system.

In an inflatable bath of sounds, the audience’s gut sounds are experimented with and woven into a composition - or gutscape - that affects our internal organs and nurtures multi-organ communication. Beyond semantics, this space enmeshes sounds with intuition, opening up to the hidden interplay of collective subconscious processes, affects and decision making that define our gut feeling. Getting closer to the sonic gutscape faciliates the emergence of a relation with our bodies outside of the traditional stigma surrounding it. The installation consists of an inflatable of five meters diameter, made of PVC and an outer silicone layer with actuators hidden beneath. These interact with the touch of the visitor, intensifying the sonic experience of the listener through haptic stimulation.

Surrounding the inflatable, the audience finds silicone cushions which they can put on top of their guts. Encapsulating a self-built hydrophone – which makes you hear the sound of blood running through the veins – they allow to transcend the capacities of our ear to listen to amplified internal movements in real-time. These sounds are intertwined with a looping electroacoustic composition of thirty minutes duration. The sonic space, which creates the feeling of being absorbed in intestines, is threefold: (1) spatialised composition with a dome-like immersive quality, (2) vibrotactile quality of lower frequencies expressed via subs and actuators and (3) live sounds of interacting audiences.