Installation with living flies and sound (2019)
Drosophila Karaoke Bar invites visitors to establish a direct exchange with fruit flies through a technical interface that invites visitors to talk and sing with the flies. Software translates human speech into the perception range of flies, allowing auditory interspecies feedback. A large pile of sand covers the flies’ habitat. Its weight insulates their buzzing from the noise of humans, representing the sensory and semantic gap between a fly and a human. On another listening station the flies’ sounds are modulated in real time raising the question of whether there are more hidden patterns of communication within the fly songs than known by science thus far.
Project Credits:
- Scientific Consultation: Birgit Brüggemeier
- Programming Karaoke Bar : Felix Bonowski
- Programming Fly Songs: Johann Niegel
Biography:
Ursula Damm (DE) is a media artist working at the intersection of art, science, and technology, a delicately balanced ground. She is professor of Design of Media Environments at Bauhaus-University Weimar. Damm’s work often engages with system interactions, machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks, and synthetic biology, but also swarm behavior or bird migration.
