Meditative Cohabitation — by Studio Above&Below

Meditative Cohabitation is an audio-visual experience investigating multi-species communication in future cities through the means of advanced technologies. Grounded in bio acoustics recordings and 3D scans of the biotop of Marais Wiels which is located in the heart of the urban landscape of Brussels, the immersive installation invites the audience to meditate between multispecies sounds and a responsive multiscreen landscape.

The project aims to engage with interspecies realities through Games Engines and AI technologies to declare the need of interspecies acknowledgement within our design process and datasets in order to build empathy and purpose for advanced technologies to serve more than human lifeforms.

Technology used: 

Custom audio sensor, Audio Classification Machine Learning Model, Touchdesigner, Unreal Engine

Artists:

Studio Above&Below is a London-based art and technology practice founded by Daria Jelonek (GER) and Perry-James Sugden (UK) after graduating from the Royal College of Art. Their work combines digital art, data and XR in order to draw together unseen connections between humans, machines and the environment.
Believing in research-based projects, Studio Above&Below often works with scientists, technologists and communities to push the boundaries of digital media for future living. Over the last years the duo has created groundbreaking and innovative artworks using immersive technologies and data in order to make the invisible visible and to give our environment a voice to express itself.
Their work has been shown internationally at institutions and festivals including the Royal Academy, Tate Modern, V&A London, Nottingham Contemporary, Photophore during the Venice Biennale, HeK Basel, MEET Milan, NRW Forum, UCCA Shanghai, Today Art Museum, WRO Biennale, WIRED Japan, and Sonar+D. Previous prizes and fundings Lumen Prize (shortlisted), Bloomberg Bursary, the Battersea Sculpture Prize, Factory Berlin x Sonar+D Artist in Residency and the S+T+Arts x Nesta Italia City of the Future prize. Their work has been published in magazines including the New York Times, MAXON, Arte and It’s Nice That.

www.studioaboveandbelow.com

Collaborator:

Yau Fan is an audio engineer in bioacoustics, noise musician, field recordist, naturalist (ornithologist, botanist, entomologist), and ecological sound designer based in Brussels.
His primary focus is on restoration of the earth on a global scale.
After working for 10 years as a sound engineer, label manager (Third Type Tapes), experimental musician and live coding performer (Exoterrism), he has switched his primary focus into landscape and permaculture design, and bioacoustics. In 2018 he has founded the open lab for bioacoustics in Brussels, and is collaborating with Myriam Lefebvre studying the communication of bees, partnered with the fungal lab for mycological experiments, and is part of the Fenetre Ovale, a Brussels based electroacoustic collective organising concerts and radio shows around the topic of species diversity, combining sound and biology.

Credits:

Concept & Design: Studio Above&Below
Production: Studio Above&Below, iMAL
Sound Design: Yau Fan
Supported and funded by: European Media Art Platform, iMAL – Art Centre for digital cultures & technology, European Union
This work was realised within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency program at iMal – Art Center for digital cultures & technology, co-funded by the European Union. This presentation was co-funded by WRO Art Center.