Ruido Perla

The sound objects represent for me the place between objectivity (of a seed) and the longing for the unknown (the mystical through the ritual). Although I grew up in South America and had some mystical experiences, everything remains unknown and far away. With my migration to Germany, the memories were trivialized on the one hand, and on the other hand, another perspective emerged, which I can only attribute to simulation.

— Luis Negrón van Grieken

Kinetic sound installation Servo motors, Java code, Arduino, computer, monitor, cables, loudspeakers, dried flame-tree seedpods, rattles from the Amazon — 7 mini robots

A monitor displays a 3D geometry alluding to the crossing of a mountainous landscape — a landscape that does not exist: it is synthesized in real time by the Perlin algorithm, originally developed by Ken Perlin to generate natural phenomena for the film Tron (1982).

On the floor, an arrangement of dried flame-tree seedpods and Amazonian rattles, mounted on small robots, is connected to the same data source that generates the landscape. The very series of numbers that draws the mountain on screen shakes the seeds on the floor. Two phenomenologies — synthetic landscape and organic sound texture — coincide within a single mathematical space, neither one imitating the other. The method video games use to synthesize mountains is thus joined with the acoustics of communal shamanic rituals in South America: programmatic precision and mystical repetition in one gesture.

The result is an apparently non-intentional musical composition — a kinetic sculpture that sounds by itself, a mechanical theater in which the machines do not merely execute: they live.

The layer of language

Again and again, contemplation is interrupted: the machines literally begin to speak.

Loudspeakers distributed throughout the space act as voices and enter into a dialogue with the rattles. They repeat phrases such as:

“Where are you from? Where do you come from… I mean, where are you really from?” („Woher kommst du? Wo kommst du her… Ich meine, wo kommst du wirklich her?”)

It is the question every migrant recognizes — the question never satisfied with the first answer. The rattle-robots respond to these questions with their movements: the interrogation becomes choreography, and the dialogue between synthetic voice and shaken seed becomes the dramaturgical center of the installation. Alongside the voices, a series of phrases and aphorisms on screen composes a virtual monologue that opens the piece onto another level: language as material — the question of origin addressed to objects that, like their author, were displaced from their context.

The piece floats in the spirit of the bachelor machines (Junggesellenmaschinen, from Duchamp via Deleuze/Guattari): machines with two facets, one mechanical and one invisible, beyond any specific function — machines that do not affirm the rule of the technical but sabotage it. It is also close to the talking apparatuses of Andreas Fischer (Düsseldorf), which speak somewhere between comedy and tragedy.

Migration is not a theme here: it is the epistemic condition that produces the piece. The “nature” of Ruido Perla is not a nature contemplated — it is a nature remembered through code.

The context: ENTER_NATURE

The group exhibition ENTER_NATURE examined the human relationship with nature in the post-digital era — the loss of nature, decolonization, cultural hierarchies, and virtual spaces as artistic exile — starting from the premise that “die Künstler:innen leben in einer analogen und digitalen Welt zugleich” (artists live in an analog and a digital world at once).

Participants: Julia Beliaeva, siddhartha lokanandi / Hopscotch Reading Room, Ting-Yun Kuo, Elif Saydam, Vitalii Shupliak, Niels Sievers, Traces, Luis Negrón van Grieken, Vitsche Culture Berlin.

Within that frame, Ruido Perla operated precisely at the hinge the exhibition proposed: a nature produced through code, displaced ritual objects given a voice, and a question of origin that the machine repeats without rest.