Role: Artist/Designer

COMMUNION is an interactive sound installation, created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. COMMUNION imagines a post-COVID world where we touch nature on a daily basis with the same curiosity we had as kids.

In COMMUNION, viewers are encouraged to touch and explore the plants – run their fingers up and down their stems, press into the leaves, tap the plant at different places, bend them or grab multiple leaves at once. The plants have sensors in their soil, with visible wires sending signals, as a metaphor to how trees communicate with each other through their ‘roots’. The sounds designed for each plant reflect the gesture they most intuitively react to and what they might sound like. So while a succulent invites one to tap (leading to more percussive sounds), a leafy plant reacts more to how many leaves are touched (manifesting as more notes played), while another may react to where its stem is pressed, or how far it’s bent.

Software/Systems Used: Max/MSP, Ableton, Bare Conductive, Arduino, p5js