biomusic project-I

NATURA MADRE - NATURA MORTA

INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION

by STATHIS CHRYSIKOPOULOS & FILONAS LAMPROU

Greece, Patras Cultural Capital City of Europe, 2006 (iset - contemporary greek art institute)

Cyprus, Nicosia, 2007 (iset - contemporary greek art institute)

The concept

The Biomusic project-I is not a finalized electroacoustic piece with a specific structural concept based on a fixed overal form, like any conventional acousmatic composition. The result of this project is an open conceptual intermedia artwork, with a variety of sonic options and compositional strategies, with electronic systems, for extra-musical natural data gathering, fulfilling the needs of the live experimental electronic audio-visual interactive installation, Natura Madre – Natura Morta. This innovative project was presented, for its world premier, at the Cultural Capital City of Europe, Patras 2006, during July 2006 and attracted about one thousand visitors. One year later, in September of 2007, the work was presented in Nicosia, Cyprus, by commission of the cultural centre of the Hellenic Bank and the cultural foundation Avantgarde, sponsored by the Ministry of Education & Culture of Cyprus.

“Order is man’s dream, «chaos» is nature’s law”? Perhaps we could never be able to give a proper answer to this quotation. Nevertheless the moment that we capture nature’s behavior with the aid of modern computer technology is a fascinating one. Moreover it is strongly inspiring for the modern sonic artist and offers up many contemporary formal and structural concepts. Natura Madre - Natura Morta is an interactive work and relies on a technological and philosophical framework of a preconceived conceptual open score. This open infinite form is brought to life by nature’s processes, combined with the human presence and the human interference. In this project the sonic artist is preprogramming his systems to interact with natural laws and exploit inaudible and invisible natural data. He aims to provide to his audience the soundscapes resulting from his interaction with nature. Through this intermedia artwork we recreate a visual and sonic environment, to express and communicate our aesthetical and philosophical views.

F. Lamprou, 2005

The score

ARTSCAPE - SOUNDSCAPE

Interactive installation balancing realism and symbolism:

Birth, Life, and Death.

The two landscapes are moving in a specific "time-space"

"action - reaction - interference"

The main body of the "artscape" - space -

Is symbolizing the surrounding space of Nature, where Life is imprinted.

The two time poles:

Natura Madre - Natura Morta

Life's primitive symbols

Birth - Death

The plant columns condense in a linear mode Life's course on earth and

its interaction between the human element and the environment;

Living - lifeless; Organic - inorganic.

In every step, every move, life is connected with death;

Plants= life, led= underworld, death.

"Order" is man's dream.

"Chaos" is nature's law.

Movement: Eternal. The "soundscape" celestial, chaotic

Compatible with the philosophic view of the "artscape"

The two Scapes are being in a constant interactive transformation.

The "timbral" quality of the soundscape

Deriving from the reestablishment of the constant and variable parameters

reinforces the symbolisms of artistic poetry into parallel levels of interpretation.

It is brought to life by the human presence and the human interference with the plants.

The ecological realism is being developed from the interactive environment itself.

Alexandra A. Goritsopoulou, 2005

The sketch

S. Chrysikopoulos, 2005

ORPHIC HYMN TO NATURE

Nature, all parent, ancient, and divine,

O much-mechanic mother, art is thine;

Heavenly, abundant, venerable queen,

In every part of thy dominions seen.

Untamed, all-taming, ever splendid light,

All ruling, honored, and supremely bright,

Immortal, first-born, ever still that same,

Nocturnal, starry, shining, glorious dame.

Thy feet's still traces in a circling course,

By thee are turned, with unremitting force.

Pure ornament of all the powers divine,

Finite and infinite alike you shine;

To all things common and in all things known,

Yet incommunicable and alone.

Without a father of thy wondrous frame,

Thyself the father whence thy essence came.

All-flourishing, connecting, mingling soul,

Leader and ruler of this mighty whole.

Life-bearer, all-sustaining, various named,

And for commanding grace and beauty famed.

Justice, supreme in might, whose general sway

The water of the restless deep obey.

Aetherial, earthly, for the pious glad,

Sweet to the good, but bitter to the bad.

All-wife, all bounteous, provident, divine,

A rich increase of nutriment is thine;

Father of all, great nurse, and mother kind,

Abundant, blessed, all-spermatic mind:

Mature, impetuous, from whose fertile seeds

And plastic hand, this changing scene proceeds.

All-parent power, to mortal eyes unseen,

Eternal, moving, all-sagacious queen.

By thee the world, whose parts in rapid flow,

Like swift descending streams, no respite know,

On an eternal hinge, with steady course

Is whirled, with matchless, unremitting force.

Throned on a circling car, thy mighty hand

Holds and directs, the reins of wide command.

Various thy essence, honored, and the best,

Of judgement too, the general end and test.

Intrepid, fatal, all-subduing dame,

Life-everlasting, Parca, breathing flame.

Immortal, Providence, the world is thine,

And thou art all things, architect divine.

O blessed Goddess, hear thy suppliant's prayer,

And make my future life, thy constant care;

Give plenteous seasons, and sufficient wealth,

And crown my days with lasting peace and health.

Translated by Thomas Taylor (1785-1835)

The system

The whole project is based on the electro-physiology of plants. The system translates the bioelectrical signals, in real time, into sound, by feeding the generated raw-data stream into a preprogrammed computer system, and the sonic result is diffused to the audience with a multichannel audio system. The artist is responsible for the timbral character through real-time sound synthesis, the setup, the tuning and the control of the system as well as for the spatial, textural and harmonic form. Thus the system can produce endless sonic variations over the infinite musical time scale, without any further intervention, according to the combination of artistic strategies and natural processes.

Plants produce electric potentials/currents as part of their living process. They have something equivalent to a simple version of a nervous system, which produces electrical impulses. All plants are sensitive and react according to various external causes, e.g. they change their potentials/currents of low voltage if the environmental lighting or temperature changes. Some plants are very sensitive to external stimuli and present mechanical reactions as well. Over the course of several years (late 1960s - mid 1970s), one of the world’s leading medical physiologists, Dr John Burdon-Sanderson of the University College, London, conducted many experiments on the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), (Plants Have Feelings Too. URL: http://www.thacker.plus.com/plants/stbdd.html [09 July 2003]). The first experiment, and possibly the most remarkably revealing of all, was to attach electrodes to the surface of the trap lobes in the hope of recording electrical activity. He found that each time a trigger hair was touched it fired off a wave of electrical activity almost identical to the nerve impulses, or action potentials, produced by animal neurons. He then carried out the same experiment on other touch sensitive plants, such as the movements of the leaves of the Sensitive Plant (Mimosa pudica) and the curling of the leaves of sundew plants (Drosera) and always found the same electrical activity and electrical impulses.

These experiments lead to the hypothesis that plants have some sort of nervous system similar to that of animals, electrical impulses detecting touch and triggering an appropriate response. Many scientists and researchers continued these investigations until late 90s and due to modern technological equipment and deeper understanding of molecular and cellular biology, the findings of Dr Burdon-Sanderson were confirmed and extended furthermore. In 1970, Pravda published an article by professor Ivan Issidorovitch Gunar, head of the Academy's Department of Plant Physiology, which confirmed the presence of electrical impulses in plants, similar to nerve impulses in humans (The Search for Truth. URL: http://www.equilibra.uk.com/shop5.shtml [09 July 2003] ). Cleve Backster, a lie-detector expert who ran a school on lie-detection for policemen and security agents in New York City, rather accidentally detected primary perception in plants in 1968 and then he started experiments with his polygraph to prove that plants respond to certain stimuli. Backster was also famous, notorious in fact, and had been since about 1968 when he first claimed that plants have primary perceptions which can even sense human thoughts and respond to them (Happy Plants. URL: http://www2.cedarcrest.edu/ academic/writing/pleasure09/wallflowers.htm [10 July 2003]).

Not only touch-sensitive plants with mechanical reactions but also ordinary plants respond to touch, and although they don’t move, we can detect electrical activity on them. Plants respond electrically to physical stimulation but biolectrical signals and electrical impulses can be detected on plants not only as a response to touch, also as part of various internal processes. Some scientists/researchers have studied plants’ electrophysiology with very interesting conclusions. Dr A. Goldsworthy a specialist in plant technology at the Department of Biological Sciences of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, has intensively studied Plant Electrophysiology and has also correlated his findings with the electro-physiology of the Cell and with the nervous system of animals and human beings.

The biolectrical music system for Natura Madre – Natura Morta consisted of a hardware transducer, used to capture biolectrical signals and translate them into sound. The system picks up two signals from the plants and converts these signals into sounds. The first signal is derived from changes in the electrical resistance of the plant, and is analogous to Galvanic Skin Response in humans. As the plant also produces another kind of signal which is 'bio-electric potentials' we mix these with the galvanic resistance-change signals to produce a composite signal. Furthermore we separate the two signals to give two outputs. It is low voltage variations that we pick up as well as changes in resistance as well, related with the internal processes of the plants and with some external stimuli and environmental conditions. The sound system and the speakers are hidden, so the visitor feels that the sound is coming from the plants.

F. Lamprou, 2005

NATURA MADRE - NATURA MORTA

A Modern Ode to Nature

It is in the nature of mankind to wish for learning

Aristotle, «Metaphysics»

Mankind and Nature are notions virtually synonymous.

Nature, as a whole of plant, animal and geological organisms, formations and elements, constitutes the universe and comprises the existence of man.

All is however not said concerning nature, merely with what surrounds us. It also regards, and at the same time determines gender, identity, behaviour, our genetic characteristics, our trends, our learning capacity, and even the way in which we think and act.

But the same word is also used to define the particular spiritual and mental world of persons and their biological substance, and also the acquired elements of personality, which are habits. For indeed, 'a habit acquired is second nature'.

Everything in our life relates to nature, to such an extent that man is justifiably considered to represent it in miniature.

Not only does the history of art begin with depictions from nature and, consequently of life, it also in its course contrived complex linguistic, semeiotic compositions such as the Still Life, with which to refer to one particular thematic category.

As a term, Still Life, or Natura Morta, is juxtaposed against the term Mother Nature, a term of much greater semantic breadth of range, applications and references, with association to the female sex. This bi-polarity of Mother Nature - Still Life, as in a synoptic philosophical view of human life is the option chosen by the artist in plastic arts, Stathis Chrysikopoulos and the sound artist, Filonas Lamprou, in order to create an interactive environment.

At first glance the installation has an appearance of simplicity, yet it is a multiple audio-visual composition, housed in Patras in an Anglican church and entitled Natura Madre - Natura Morta (Mother Nature-Still Life). The selection of the particular site is of course not accidental. The placing of the work in a sacred surround, in Aristotelian terms meta-physical incites the visitor to approach the work as if about to take part in a mystic sacrament: of Nature. Its axis is between a pragmatic, almost bio-technological ― and in any event scientific ― construct on the one hand, and on the other a symbolic, idealistic approach.

The visual part of the work intimates the ritual. The space it occupies is defined by panels forming a linear parallelogram. Upon entering, the visitor is met by the Orphic Hymn to Nature, presumably to indicate clearly from the start that the ritual refers to no specific creed but is a mystic rite, a ceremony celebrating nature. The first panel, the only one to have two sides, forms the entrance and is at the same time the key to deciphering the work. For the inner side, constitutes one of the poles of the course to be followed, which is none other than the course of life toward death. Moss, forming a triangle, the archetypal symbol of woman's generative nature, is fixed to it. The inscription 'Mother Nature' confirms the association, declaring the direct relation of Mother to Nature.

The second panel, placed diametrically opposite, flanked on either side by lead stelae, plant-stands with sigonium plants, bears the inscription Still Life (Νεκρή Φύση in Greek). This inscription too functions associatively, placed above a truncated and therefore dead tree.

The plant-stands, placed in ranks at regular intervals could refer to the stages of human life, its stations, its intervals and pinnacles. These elements, made of lead, also stand against white panels defining a geometric space. The alignment provides a rhythm of vision, capable of completing the visible environment. The visual landscape is however complemented by a broader and undefined environment of sound.

The stands are not there as plant-holders alone, they also conceal a mechanism of sensors registering the plants' reactions. The composer and sound artist Filonas Lamprou is aware that in the last forty years scientific researchers have proved that plants has a nervous system somewhat approaching the most rudimentary form, producing an electric current. Experiments lead to the hypothesis that it is an undeveloped form of the animal nervous system*.

The premise for this current is the existence of action-reaction. The visitor-actor provokes a reaction in the plant which, albeit invisible, exists and is reproduced in sound.

The intervention of the visitors may at times be intensified, provoked by protracted ruffling of the leaves and at others more gentle, by a soft touch. Electric current may also be produced by the sound of a voice, breathing, or even by certain thoughts alone. The sensors register the plants' reaction and, just as an ECG transcribes the heart-beat or a seismograph the tremors onto a diagram, transpose the electric reactions into sounds. They are the sounds of the cosmos, asymmetrical, unique, indefinable. Of the cosmos, for the reference is to a sound beyond any known way of producing it, asymmetrical because it does not obey to any known rules of melody and, finally, unique in its integrality.

Each visitor moreover transmits his or her own electric energy, besides the physical activity, and evidently, each plant accordingly reacts differently. The resulting sound - although it is produced by the artists - is indefinable and unpredictable, uncontrollable. It is furthermore obvious that there is never a way the plant's reaction as receptor to the dynamics and quality of each diverse external intervention may be determined. The sensors register the reaction and reproduce it in sound. The artists selected representation by the medium of sound, as presumptive universal code, as they might have chosen digital representations. In this way though, maybe the magic would be lost of the combination of creativity and science, if the work tended to be more connected to technology.

The interactive installation and the dialogue between the delimited visual and the indeterminable audial presuppose the dialogue between the artists themselves. Stathis Chrysikopoulos, with his approach of plastic art and Filonas Lamprou's apocalyptic acoustic revelation of the plants' reactions are conversing and, in agreement as to the unlimited possibilities offered by nature to the sectors of the intellect, the arts and sciences, have undertaken a contemporary and universally familiarized rendering of the myth of Orpheus.

Of the myth, that is to say, of the man who, through his music and his love, was able to reverse the principles of Beginning and End and redefine the course of Life to Death, no longer as linear progression but as everlasting cycle.

All the elements of the ancient myth are there, with its symbolism of Nature (Woman, Love) - Life (Expression, Joy, Suffering) - Death (Journey, Lead) and constitute a place common to all.

In the resulting area of interactivity, the action of living, which is the part consisting of instruments is set in a frame of inactivity, the twin poles of the two ultimate notions of cosmogony. It is true that both life as well as death occur, or are at any rate perceived by man, only within his demarcated environment: nature. It is therefore not fortuitous that in this installation the elements at the two extremities, by now cut off from nature, are not energized, and consequently provide no further information beyond their aesthetic and emblematic presence.

The alignment in parallelogram of the elements of life (the lead plant-stands) enables the elliptical perusal of the work and in consequence, the progress from the beginning to the end and back to the starting point. The work clearly stresses the interrelation of the life chain with nature, while at the same time it signals functions capable of arousing the sensitivity of the ecologically most deprived sensibilities, to the benefit of the quality of life on our planet and of our world. The work moreover projects the power of art, possibly as a smaller unit of creativity emanating from nature itself, and activates an entire system of symbolic and notional associations that connect mankind to the universe.

In my own opinion however, the achievement of this work is in the 'coercion' by the two artists of the actor-onlooker to see the synergy and the interrelation of two theoretically opposite worlds: of science and of art, the rational and the conjectural. By doing this they indicate the probability of both worlds having a common source. And who, in truth, on coming out of this space, could consider the distance between myth and science as immeasurable? How far apart can they yet be? Maybe not at all. This possibility appears to meet Martin Heidegger's philosophical postulation that nature is revealed as dormant. Where? Perhaps everywhere. But in any case certainly in science as much as in myth.

Katerina Koskina

Athens, May 2006

* Dr. John Burdon-Sanderson , Plants Have Feelings Too. URL: http://www.thacker.plus.com/plants/stbdd.html

* Ivan Issidorovitch Gunar, The Search of Truth. URL: http://www.equilibra.uk.com/shop5.shtml

NATURA MADRE - NATURA MORTA

Nature loves to conceal itself

Heraclitus

The Suda attributes to Heraclitus the appellative σκοτεινός_ (the obscure) . According to Crates and Socrates a deep-sea diver would be required to plumb the depth of his words. The opinions of Plato, Aristotle, Strabo, Timon, Apuleius and Seneca were no different. "Dimness and deepest night" are the words used to define his work in an ancient epigram. For Plutarch too the way in which his sentences were formed was obscure, while his images on the other hand are clear. Again, for the Suda his style is clear, and most definitely poetic.

Over the centuries Heraclitus' obscurity appeared as a perennially reversible code to be consulted in its vertiginous semantic polyvalency: wherever the oxymoron becomes the rule of the proposition and palindromic reading is the key to the 'truth' contained there.

Inspired by the Orphic Hymn to Nature, this work by Stathis Chrysikopoulos, realised in collaboratiion wth the composer-musictechnologist Filonas Lamprou, for Patras European Culture Capital, also in a way refers back to Heraclitus and to one of his most frequently visited aphorisms in hermeneutic terms. It is a fragment which since Greek and Roman antiquity, by way of Porphyry, Julian, Macrobius, Marsilio Ficino, Pascal, and then Rousseau, Schiller, Hölderlin, Goethe, Nietzsche and Heidegger, has become a real epistemological obsession, enquired into, eviscerated and in the end interpreted as a concept perennially in progress, open to all possible values: 'Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλέι ("Nature loves to conceal itself").

Entitled Natura Madre / Natura Morta, Chrysikopoulos' installation in its own way adds an added hypothesis for a reading of Heraclitus' fateful words - and we will see how. These three words in more than twenty-five centuries of enervating critical interpretation have gradually come to mean this: that everything which is born is destined to die; that it is difficult to know Nature; that it manifests itself through sensitive forms or in the shape of myth; that it conceals within itself impenetrable qualities; but also that at the outset the Being locates itself within a state of contraction and concealment. And finally, according to Heidegger's explanation, that the Being reveals itself by concealing itself.

In the end this process took on the form of an endless speculation between philosophy, myth, science and alchemy which ended up by consolidating the enigma concealed within the natural phenomenon, a phenomenon which mankind in a delirium of knowledge continues to interrogate without receiving the answer it expects. Endowed with a divine essence, according to the thoughts of the Stoics, Nature became in the eyes of mankind a sort of taboo, e terrible and unfathomable secret. This is what lies at the basis of that regurgitation of the ancestral which causes ancient superstitions to reappear. Think of the unleashing of destructive energies, of the vendetta exerted by Nature upon mankind which since the late Middle Ages has violated it, making use of technical and mechanical instruments, together with magic, resources that constitute the antecedent to modern experimental science of which Francis Bacon is the precursor.

The 'reply' that Chrysikopoulos provides with his installation to this great question is "transversal" inasmuch as it conforms to the essentially sacred and metaphysical character which emerges as a recurrent denominator from philosophical enquiries that for centuries have been aimed at natural phenomena. Faced with the investigative and gnosiological methods activated by science and technology, the only possible reply to the ancient question would therefore be the recognition, admirably demonstrated by the Orphic Hymn, of the attributes due to Nature understood as mother and as divinity. Which also means attributing the myth with the fundamental significance of 'poetic physics' (1), in the sense that within it every natural phenomenon disguises itself and manifests itself in the form of fable and allegory. In this way an aesthetic truth is suggested alongside scientific truth through art and poetry prefigured by myth: perhaps the only truth able to procure an authentic knowledge of Nature (2).

This is the line which Chrysikopoulos' work takes. He takes, that is, the part of Orpheus who penetrated the secrets of Nature not with violence, but with harmony, rhythm and song. George Santayana responds to Rainer Maria Rilke, who maintained that "song is existence" (3), with the words "To denude divinities of their clothing is not in agreement with my principles of critical interpretation and I recognise that it is a heresy. Divinities cannot be denuded of their clothing because their attributes are their substance" (4).

Chrysikopoulos in this way turns himself into an artist-demiurge drawing on formulas that, beyond their lyrical power of suggestion, certainly derive from cults connected to the mystic religion of Orphism and the orphic doctrine of the creation of the world and of catharsis. The epithets by which Nature is gratified constitute the raw material of this personal liturgy which literally becomes 'opening' and initiation into the mysteries related to the Hymn.

'Infinite' Nature who is at the same time 'finished', the 'bearer of light', the 'prudent', the 'wholly wise', the 'undaunted', the 'born out of herself' and the 'never born', the 'ever-changing', she who 'contains within herself all things' and who can arouse only ecstatic contemplation. This is the song of Orpheus, and Orpheus is the mark, a mark called 'art'. With that song the Thracian god bewitches everything he encounters along his way: animals, stones, plants. And this is the point, this is where we have the connection, the conceptual pretext of the work with which Chrissicopoulos has contributed to the age-old question: 'revealing' the voice of Nature, when it is precisely a plant, in this case the sigonium, which acts as an instrument and vehicle for his action.

In The metamorphosis of plants, Goethe displays his own conception of the vegetable world by analysing the complex connection and reciprocal interferences that unite man with Nature. The observations which this German writer left us in his scientific studies always lead us back to the perceptive potential which every individual who is seeking a real understanding of Nature can count on, and who sees in her a reflection of himself. In other words, the metamorphosis of Nature can become metamorphosis of the life of the soul (5).

The path along which the visitor to Natura Madre / Natura Morta walks between the two theories of plants, becomes the rite that provides the collimation of the metamorphoses which Goethe speaks of: that which is inherent to the vegetable world - a world which is sensitive and living not only for myth, but also for science - and that which acts upon the human psyche.

A system of sensors connected to pots of sigonium captures the psychic moods of those passing by and translates them into variable sounds. The New Orpheus, the visitor (who by extension stands for humankind), will not therefore limit himself to seduction of the natural order over which he would like to extend his supremacy - as on the other hand is aspired to by science - but will also become the interlocutor of Nature, the receiver of his message.

In other words Chrysikopoulos enacts a parable of existence where the physical element and the metaphysical coincide just as the pre-Socratic philosophers wanted when founding the principles that support the universe. The path is presented as being rigorously axial and, inasmuch as it is a liturgical ceremony, has a start and an end. The prologue consists of a symbolic image of Mother Nature which is dealt with by using female genitals covered in moss as a sinecdoche: this is where life is generated, but also where the path starts. At its extreme opposite a dead tree indicates an epilogue, the necessary end of the life cycle, an end already announced by the base upon which the plants are placed, lead, the alchemical metal which can be linked to Hades, the supreme chthonic divinity.

Natura Madre / Natura Morta is in the end a dramaturgy which races towards its fatal conclusion where, according to Heraclitus' aphorism, Nature again conceals herself and denies herself, like Truth, behind her abysmal secrets (6). The Orphic way undertaken by the artist thus transforms itself into the most necessary of illusions.

Giuliano Serafini

Florence - March 2006

1) P.Hadot, Le voile d'Isis, Pub.Gallimard Paris 2004, p.88

2) P. Ronsard, in P. Hadot, op. cit, p.110

3) R. M. Rilke, Les sonnets à Orphée, I, 3 (translation Angelloz) Paris 1928, p.14

4) G. Santayana, Soliloquies in England, London 1937, p.241

5) J.W.Goethe, Die Metamotrphosen der Pflanzen (1818-1820), HA, t.13, p.115

6) Democritus, fragm.117, Dumont, p.873