Installation | Adriano C. Monteiro & Rafaela B. Pires: “DE/RE:GENERATION”
De/Re:Generation stems from a speculative question: would cicadas sense acoustic information during the up to 17 years they live underground, before emerging from the soil for a brief adult phase marked by intense acoustic display? From this perspective, the installation approaches sound not only as an auditory phenomenon, but as something sensed through the body, making vibration and tactile perception central to the experience.
At the core of the work are rounded, shell-like sculptures molded from biodegradable cassava-starch bioplastics. These forms visually echo cicada nymphs and exuviae: fragile, hollow exoskeletons that signal absence, transfor-mation, and continuation. Like the remnants left after metamorphosis that nourish other species, the installation’s ma-terials participate in an ongoing process of regeneration: they deform over time, respond to humidity and dryness, and become alternately more rigid or more flexible, like a living skin in dialogue with the environment. Integrated as touch interfaces, the bioplastic sculptures function as tactile sensing surfaces that mediate the interaction with the sound en-vironment formed by vibrating surfaces and low-frequency sound fields, that allude to the cicada’s aboveground and underground sonic worlds, blurring boundaries between tactile and auditory modes of perception, organic material and inorganic technological systems.
About the artists
Adriano Monteiro is a music composer and researcher. His work focus on the convergence of art, science and technology for creative processes, performance and analysis of music. He is the author of eletroacustic and intermedia works in different media and formats, such as acousmatic, live electronics, audiovisual performances and installations, network and telematic music, and also author and coauthor of several articles concerning creative processes in music and musical analysis. Adriano Monteiro is an associate professor of Music Composition at the School of Music and Scenic Arts of Federal University of Goiás (EMAC/UFG). He studied music composition at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and holds a PhD in music from the same institution.
Rafaela Blanch Pires is a designer and professor at the Scenic Arts department at the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil). Her background is in fashion design, MA in “Fashion and Textiles” and PhD in “Design and Architecture” (São Paulo University). Between 2015 and 2016 she worked as a doctoral visiting student at the “Wearable Senses Lab” at the Technical University of Eindhoven (Holland). She experiments with the areas of bio-materials, digital fabrication, special effects make-up, costume design and electronics.