“Signals Beneath”
Macchina Gallery, Escuela de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Interactive sound-sculpture installation, 2026, 24 x 24 x 6 feet. 40 medical bags, 20 IV stands, 14-channel speakers, contact microphones, sensors, wires, soil samples, vital signals monitor, sound samples, soil data sonification, vocal sounds, soil sample data, and 14-channel audio mixer.
Collaborative piece by Pedram Baldari, Rodrigo Cadiz, and Nooshin Hakim Javadi.
To learn more about this work, look up the link to the exhibition brochure published by the gallery
Signals Beneath is a large-scale multichannel sound-sculpture installation investigating land, extraction, ecological violence, and the relationship between environmental and bodily vulnerability. Developed through two years of collaborative research, fieldwork, soil sampling, and environmental analysis across Chile, the installation consists of forty medical bags containing soil, suspended from IV stands and distributed throughout the gallery as individual sculptural and sonic units. Contact microphones register touch and vibration, activating site recordings, vocalized environmental data, and other sonic material through a multichannel system, while a central vital-sign monitor translates the activity into real-time waveforms. Audiences can activate the entire installation through uncoordinated individual interactions, or an ensemble of musicians can perform it collectively as a multi-tonal, multi-instrument sound installation to produce a composed work.
The work follows our earlier collaboration, Diatomic Variations: The Occurrence of Sounds from the Fossilized Past, exhibited at the Weisman Art Museum in 2024, a singular interactive sound sculpture modeled after oil-pipeline control systems and using environmental data collected from Great Lakes sites as a structural basis for generating sound.
