0h!m1gas. Stridulation amplified: on biomimetic stridulation environments and the use of bioacoustics as an artistic resource

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  • 0h!m1gas. Stridulation amplified: on biomimetic stridulation environments and the use of bioacoustics as an artistic resource

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Abstract:

  • Heinz von Foerster said that the listener, not the speaker, determined the meaning of an expression, and by this meant, both the listener and the speaker when facing each other instantiate an environment of conditions – a cybernetic ecology – where the two become one symbiotic organism, who once conformed tries to negotiate the meaning of its existence in a determined point of time and space. The subjectivity and objectivity, implied in a communication network, are nothing more than instances of the poetics of immersion that each movement, gesture, message contains.

    Bioacoustics and Biomimetics help us approach the natural phenomena manifested by all social living beings on this planet: communication is learning by imitation and to imitate creativity is to listen and see in order to mimic a successful behaviour which produces a successful reward. We all imitate creativity from nature, we all depend on each other, and therefore, we are influenced by each other. Seeing and adapting transformations and mutations throughout the open source network of evolution is in fact evolution driven by feedback, and we can approach, embrace and imagine this evolution network through experiments within the fields of Bioacoustics and Biomimetics. To this extent, stridulation is perhaps one of the most underestimated communication mechanisms found in social and solitary insects, and it definitely needs to be revived, celebrated, amplified. The application of cybernetics and an artistic open mind, towards the understanding and analysis of stridulation phenomena, such as acoustic and vibratory messages shared by social communitarian beings, like ants and humans, have gained increased attention in the field of artistic research. Yet the cybernetics behind the system of self-organisation and emergence in ants and other social beings, is but a mere example of what have always been the inspirational ground for the human brain to imagine, create and produce, attaining technological and engineering achievements which come from the nature that surrounds us: aerodynamical cars, thermo-regulated materials, hydrodynamical swimsuits, traffic networks, peer-to-peer file sharing, are all examples of the mutated influence of nature on our creative minds.
    A musical composition, played by piano, guitar, trumpet, a turntable, or any other electro-acoustical-vibratory instrument, constitutes in its essence a combination of patterns, in which each individual signal has an harmonic emergent quality, with the potential of interpretation focused on the actors and reactors of the contextual sphere in which everything takes place. Music is nonverbal communication and the use, or even abuse, of amplified sounds definitely belongs to the diverse array of biocommunication strategies we encounter in the world of living organisms, which we humans can learn from and apply

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