Para[site]
w/ Lucas Kuzma
Jun. 2003

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Michel Serres in his book The Parasite defines the parasite as a microbe, an insidious infection that takes without giving and weakens without killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interferance in a channel. These seemingly dissimilar activities are, according to Michel Serres, not merely coincidentally expressed by the same word (in French). Rather, they are intrinsically related and, in fact , thay have the same basic function in a system.

Para[site], is a project in which an architectual space is infected by Autonomous Electromechanical Instruments which feed off their host by physically striking the structures of the building for sound generation.

It is our aim to combine a number of such devices distributed throughout space into a musical unity. To avoid lapses into cacophony, this will require the development of a synchronization mechanism utilizing timers or perhaps some primitive sort of decentralized networking. Also, through the use of like sensors, a group of devices will respond to a global environmental event in concert. Thus, something like the rising sun or a creaking door could be used to synchronize an instrument group.



Related Projects:
- Musical Typewriter