Semilla Manual

*excerpt (original work duration: 6’03”)

The piece consists of a manual with the guidelines for making homemade sound seeds/semillas. This manual operates like a tool for disseminating and spreading the underground resistance of the semilla. The semilla is a small artifact, a capsule containing a speaker and an mp3 player. It is meant to be buried in the ground in a ritual where the semilla is offered to the Earth as a symbolic act of resonance and mutual care. From the underground a subtle sound piece will emerge, this piece is composed with the resonant frequency of our planet as its fundamental frequency. In order to listen to it, we must put our bodies and ears in contact with the Earth. This seed is a symbolic piece that marks the beginning of something that grows in time, like an idea, like a movement. It is a resonant amulet that protects the place it is buried as it produces noise and unwanted vibrations that render the place invisible for extractive telluric sensors used by oil and gas companies to find new places for extraction. This way the semilla is an element of active protection.

The manual aims to invite people to join the movement by printing them as posters to diffuse the word and making semillas for their land. Hopefully, we can create a collective network of seeds and build together this underground resistance of resonance and care.

*A set of sounds are shared to create original compositions as well as remixes. Everybody can eventually submit their sounds for a collection of the underground album that will be buried around the world.

*Special thanks to Novas Frequências (Brasil) and curator chico dub for commissioning and activating this work for the exhibition “Pra Onde Agora?”, 2021.

**Special thanks to Manaswi Mishra for the Machine Learning Sound experiments.

***Special thanks to Chucho Ocampo and ppppress (MIT, Art, Culture, and Technology Program) for the risograph prints <3