Aketzalli

The Sound of Plant Life is an artistic research project developed at the Master of Music (terminal music technology) at UNAM that seeks from sound to share what we know today about plant living beings. The end result was a site-specific sound installation, with the aim of experiencing the space of the country's botanical gardens in a different way. To achieve this sound installation on a mobile device, two main objectives were determined: 1) obtaining sound from the organic constant of DNA functioning (activation and repression of specific genes) that dictates the development of plants (life cycle) and 2) locate the resulting sounds in the space, generating a multi-informational experience in the country's botanical gardens by developing an app that works as a geolocated sound installation (use of GPS).
Therefore, this project strives to promote a new vision of the plant world and of research from a transdisciplinary work, envisioning a symbiosis between the technological human being and the environment with a scientific and cultural focus; suppressing barriers between the objective and subjective from the flow of information from the biological sciences to sound art.

Note: the biological information used for the sonification process was extracted from the genetic material of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana; only MADS-type genes were considered because of their importance in plant development. These genes are present in all Angiosperm plants or flowering plants, so the sonified information can be extrapolated to talk about The Sound of Plant Life.

unam || master || tutor