CABIN FEVER (2021) adaptive sound installation
3 geodesic domes, 3 light systems, 6 channels integrated sound system, sensors
Giulio Colangelo and Cesare Saldicco: concept, sound, software and interaction development
Production: LOXOSconcept in partnership with BuildWithHubs Ltd
First perf.: 5>12/09/2021 Casa degli Artisti, Design Week – Milan
Cabin Fever
noun [‘kæb.in ,fiː.vər]: a state characterized by anxiety, restlessness, and boredom, arising from a prolonged stay in a remote or confined place.
Cabin Fever is an adaptive interactive sound installation consisting of three geodesic domes of different structures and sizes. It refers to the distressing claustrophobic syndrome and to the discomfort that each of us experienced during the lockdown.
A computer algorithm that works through audio speakers, exciters, infrared sensors and LEDs determines the presence and movement of humans in order to generate a dystopian sound design. An illusory comfort zone that forces us to question ourselves about a new way of conceiving spaces and distances.
COVID-19 has imposed a radical change in daily lifestyle on society around the world, through a dramatic reminder and a terrifying social experiment of planetary interconnectedness and interdependence. Not only social and cultural interdependence, but also natural and biological.
The work consists of three modular geodesic domes that metaphorically trace the three phases of the pandemic; in a process of synthesis and sound dramaturgy, the two artists question the need for a society forced to redesign time and space, establishing new perimeters of safety.
The sound spaces equipped with a multi-channel sound system and sensors, which detect the entry of visitors and determine the acousmatic textures and glitches diffused inside the other domes, triggering a process of contagion between the domes and their own inhabitants.
Visitors individually join the sound spaces. The entrance and the type of movements of the user determines sound mutations inside their own area of action. Through a specific algorithm, the sensors react to the movements of the users in the two open domes. Over time the domes become more and more “intolerant” to the human presence, so an accumulation process made of glitches, noisy textures, led flickering, are transferred to the third closed dome which filters the process through the low frequencies.
Cabin Fever refers to the recent syndrome of those who, due to fear or anxiety, prefer to continue their isolation, staying home, avoiding contact with the outside world. In the hasty emergency evolution and the worrying birth of a future marked by control and increasingly decisive technology, the user finds a sort of comfort zone where they can recall self-isolation, listen to their fears again, exorcise the deepest uncertainties. Cabin Fever is an installation produced by LOXOSconcept in partnership with BuildWithHubs Ltd.
Vimeo link:
PA[E/S]SAGGI SONORI (2018) Interactive audio installation
Cesare Saldicco | concept, direction and software development
in collaboration with Alessandro Duma, Alessandro Ferraro, Valentino Imbriani and Luca Risconi
Edition: unpublished
Duration: ad libitum
First perf.: 15/02/2018, Cantieri Teatrli Koreja, Lecce
PA[E/S]SAGGI SONORI is an interactive, sound and itinerant installation, in which the public is projected in a dimension suspended between ancient and contemporary. Four boxes arranged on as many columns hold elements and fragments of an ancient sound heredity.
A non passive experience, which aims to stimulate the curiosity of the audience by subtracting it from the expectation that precedes a concert. A seduction that pushes the user to explore without interruption – and without particular constraints – four possible sound landscapes that belonged to the 18th century Salento geography; Thus we pass from the political contradiction of the Napoleonic promises declined in a still very divided social reality, to the salento moroloja, the funeral lamentations that the women performed during the funeral, and then proceed towards a sound landscape where the passage of time is punctuated by the sound, metaphor of the uninterrupted flow of daily life; to the last box, the most musical, where the rhythms and timbre of the taranta lead us into a hypnotic and demiurgic dimension.
Conceived as a choral work and realized within the Electronic Music class of the Conservatory of Lecce, the installation is designed as a recovered and restored sound landscape, but also as a sound passage (hence the need for an ambivalent title) from one box to another, revealing the mythological symbology and the technology connected to each sound box.
Exactly like in one of those quantum paradoxes, the meaning contained in the box is the overlap of two possible states and only the interaction from the outside can determine the right one.
L’ORIGINE DU MONDE 2.0 APRÉS COURBET (2016) Interactive Installation for Audio, Video and non linear Feedback
Cesare Saldicco | Software and interaction developement and sound design
First perf.: 04/06/2016 La Société de Curiosités, Paris
L’origine du monde 2.0 (après Courbet) is an interactive installation for audio, video and non-linear feedback.
A column of light is projected where two adjacent walls meet at right angles, animating the “slot” in a fibrillating way: the structure of this column “resonates” in relation to the exhibition space, giving back vividly and sensual sound events that inhabit the hall.
The reference to the French master is just a quote: boldness and realism of Courbet’s masterpiece and anatomical description of female genital organ transfigured into a merely symbolic and implied language, avoiding any pornographic statutes, without giving up, however, irony and the theme seduction.
ALETIDE (2013) audio/video installation
Paolo Di Giacomo, software and interaction developement
Fabio Giampietro, concept and paintings
Cesare Saldicco, software developement and sound design
Ilaria Vergani Bassi, interaction and video design
First perf.: 21/09/2013 IDR Gallery Research, Milano
Who of us has never tried to give a symbolic meaning to an informal object? The randomness of the clouds suggested in nature, or the accidental formnation of spots of color in the painting.
In psychiatry it was Hermann Rorsharch (1884-1922) who made these behaviors systematic, by selecting ten statistically significant ink stains for the study of personality.
Observed by the subject, they are associated by resemblance to an identifying content that through an imaginative elaboration is often also referable to a narrative dimension, showing attitudes in the way in which the subject perceives the world.
In the works inspired by the tables, Giampietro focuses his attention on interpretive determinants such as movement and chiaroscuro, also suggesting a three-dimensional path that invites a deep exploration of the scene.
The artists who accompany him in this installation, wanted to make the perception of a swing that flies over a dystopian urban landscape, giving us back feelings that belong to childhood. For this purpose a proximity sensor (device sensitive to movement and acceleration) detects the movements of people on the swing, while the number and type of oscillations determine the interaction between audio and video, so as to feel in first person an experience within an (unlikely) virtual concreteness.
Vimeo link:
STILL LIFE (2012) audio-video interactive installation in concerto form for cellular automata and live electronics
Edition: unpublished
Duration: 12 min.
Commission: La Biennale di Venezia 2012
First perf.: 11/10/2012 Teatro alle Tese, Venezia
Cesare Saldicco, live electronics
IanniX, sound projection
A Cellular Automata can be considered a film that is generated by itself, capable of representing and shaping a wide range of self-organized phenomena. It is a collection of cells which, on the basis of simple mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply. Still Life (literally and ironically “nature morte”) refers to the most famous of Cellular Automata: The Game of Life invented by mathematician John H. Conway. The piece suggests an image so far from the nature: the aim is not to have a slavishly sonification of the cells which drive the world of Life, rather than convey an image that pushes life to life itself. In this sense, a Kinect camera (an accessory equipped with RGB camera and dual depth sensor, sensitive to human movement and originally designed for Xbox 360), changes the morphology and relationships of the game.
Recognize, through an exploration of the sound space, forms and movements that are in our body, our thoughts, our habitat, in order to resonate with the one’s self.
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