EXO
Presented for the first time at the Constellations Festival in Metz, France, and curated by Jérémie Bellot, EXO represents a dialogue between a group of cosmic entities.
Through a language of light and sound, these extraterrestrial beings communicate using a highly structured but abstract vocabulary. The work is a research on algorithmic xenolinguistics – defined as the study of extraterrestrial languages - in which the modelling of rhythmic and linguistic audiovisual sequences generates constantly evolving phonemes, words, phrases and speech. While this theme seems to appeal to speculative and fantastic questions, the work is a metaphor for earthly concerns. Intercultural communication efforts today are a central challenge for concord on our planet on Earth and between human beings.
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EXO is a procedural light and sound installation.
A research on generative exolinguistics which deploys a speculative extraterrestrial language built upon the phonems of light rays and sound synthesis.
Lexicon emerges as sequences of this phonems, ordered through wave functions, randomness and weighted probabilities. Features like speed, density, timbre or direction configure specific moods among 3 diferent light and sound entities. Words are concatenated into phrases and alternated among 3 imaginary entities which occupy key spots of the architectural space. A finite set of states (babbling, conversation, argument…) is ordered using probability chains, making sure this generative gathering will never repeat exactly again. On the scheme below you can see the probability chains (with its percentual heights) that make the installation evolve from one state to another:
As the conversation evolves, orality morphs into writing. Spoken words mutate to sonified glyphs, painting the atmosphere with alien beauty.