Diastrofismos
Work by: Nicole L’Huillier, Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, and Yasushi Sakai
Diastrofismos is a sound installation with a modular system that sends images through rhythmic patterns. It is built on a set of debris from the Alto Río building that was destroyed by the 27F earthquake in 2010 in Chile. With Diastrophisms we were looking for a poetical, critical and political crossing between technology and matter, in order to raise questions about the relationship between human beings and nature, and to consider the construction of memory in a community by questioning the notion of monument, as well as to imagine new forms of communication in times of crisis.
At dawn on 27 February 2010 in Concepción, after the Alto Río building collapsed, splitting in two, many people became trapped. As mentioned to the press by one of the inhabitants of an apartment who managed to get out alive: “Most people banged on the walls with their hands and made noises in order to communicate themselves.” Percussion surfaced once again as the first system of innate communication. Before word, before image, it is vibration, sound—a vital energy translated into blows— that builds a rhythm, a code emerging as a communication system.
Diastrophisms operates as a memory register, but also as a communication system. It presents a rhythmic syntax, using sound as a tool for communication and organization. We created a custom protocol that enables the devices to communicate with each other by generating acoustic information based on an input (image) and by listening to sonic information from its surroundings. The input is a digital image encoded in binary data and transformed into rhythmic patterns. Devices communicate and transmit these rhythmic patterns pixel by pixel by means of percussive strikes on the surface of the debris. In turn, human interference can modify the sound pattern and affect the output image.
Fundación Proyecta Memoria managed the possibility of accessing the debris, which lay in a landfill (or debris cemetery) belonging to the Dibam (Chilean Directorate of Libraries, Archives and Museums) in Penco, in the south of Chile. A team was organized with local volunteers to go to the site and unearth the fragments of the former building, which was now underground. They located the pieces, dug them up, cleaned them and sent them in a truck to the Cerrillos National Center for Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile. The disinterment was very moving as most of the team members were inhabitants of Concepción and had lived through the earthquake. After years, pieces from the Alto Rio Building were emerging from the earth full of memory and testimonies.
On the debris, we placed devices that struck the material producing a rhythmic pattern. The arrangement of the modules in different densities of debris provided acoustic variations and different resonances. The devices communicate with each other; they listen and repeat the percussive message. Each rhythmic pattern transmits a sound pixel, and after several sequences an image begins to appear as a result, creating an action of cyclic transduction. Here we see the full cycle: raw matter begins in the earth, becomes a building, then returns to the earth, where it is found as debris, which vibrates again, revealing the memory impregnated therein.
A paper about this work was published in Leonardo Journal for the special edition of Siggraph 2018 Art Papers and Art Gallery Exhibition. The paper was written by Nicole L’Huillier and Valentina Montero.
