“The black room surrounded by tweet lyrics that run like wallpaper. It is like entering one of those countless electronic music rooms that many of us have been to. One cannot help thinking of Mark Fisher and his capitalist realism and that state of being unable to think of futures that are radically different from the present that technocapitalism has induced us to feel and believe.
This spectral journey that invites us to experience this piece from materialities that are removed (?) from our ordinary lives (a canvas of crude digital signs) but which invoke in our bodies the possibility of collective dancing. The machine, as in techno, is no longer the unchanging enemy, but a door that can be hacked, transformed into a sensitive space, exploring radical subjectivities, in a collective feeling-thinking.
In Contraimaginaris Postpandèmics, our interest lies in how to overcome those narratives that fortify technology and digitality as something that is unreachable, laying bare the materiality of the radical extractive machinery that sustains it, breaking its unattainable expertise” Contraimaginaris Postpandèmics

“What does the pandemic’s soundscape sound like? How do you put sound to the information tsunami, overflowing with data, uncertainties and bad news, that has been circulating on social media such as Twitter? This musical piece invites us to transform this overwhelming digital world into a piano score. It is an immersive, sensorial work that opens the window to a reflection on the relationship between information and noise, between sound and silence, and explores the affective, subjective and corporal impact of this background noise. How do we move beyond this constant, repetitive influx of “tweets” and bad news that has been one of the pandemic’s hallmarks?” Israel Rodríguez Giralt

“Metabolising the surfeit of information through the senses, learning to walk in the storm. The composer speaks of  “feeling the data instead of trying to make sense of it rationally”. I smile when I think that, having reached such a level of complexity, the only way to optimise our processing capacity is precisely to give way to the ancient mystery of melodies and rhythms. I think of a man I saw a few years ago on telly: he maintained he could read QR codes just by looking at them, like some ancient telluric which can be learned with time and patience.” Enric Puig Punyet & Joan Yago

In March 2020 we had to stop our usual way of living and get quarantined inside our houses because of the spread of COVID-19. Locked in our bedrooms, we read the news about the pandemic, and the incoming flux of data about it just rose and rose, until a point where it was virtually impossible to follow the amount of information regarding spreading, contamination, deaths. Twitter was – and still is – one of the main platforms to distribute these news, with thousands – perhaps millions – of new tweets every day. It’s been impossible to keep up ever since.

But we didn’t need to read all those tweets. We knew what they said: bad news, the same news, over and over again: “COVID is getting worse”. And after a year and a half, although the bad news are now mixed with some good news, we are still not capable of reading all the influx of data regarding COVID-19. Although the amount of data and information available on the internet was already a problem pre-pandemic, COVID-19 may have exacerbated this issue, impacting the physical and mental health of millions. And if we cannot possibly handle it all rationally, what about subjectively? What if we could listen to the data, feel it, sense it aurally, not only through cochlear hearing, but also with our bones.

Concerto para Piano e Pandemia (Concert for Piano and Pandemic) invites us to feel with our body what the world wide web is feeling right now about the pandemic, whilst reflecting on how the amount of data we are presented with every day affects us.

Tweets are captured in real time by a python script that takes their characters and transforms them into musical notes in a piano sound. The traditional do-re-mi system didn’t feel like enough to represent the biggest health crisis of contemporary society, therefore the Western 12-tet system of notes was redistributed across the piano. As the thousands – maybe millions – of tweets reach our ears, they pile up and mix sonically, creating an immersive soundscape that messes up our senses. Although we could try to read them in the screen, but the speed in which the tweets appear on the screen makes this task practically impossible.

This feeling of not being able to read, to listen, to understand what is happening around us, is common nowadays. The huge influx of data we try to take in daily is affecting our mental health, and Concerto para Piano e Pandemia aims to represent this feeling sonically.

In what ways can we dive into such a dense stream of news and other people’s content?

Concerto para Piano e Pandemia is an artistic installation made with a Raspberry Pi connected to the internet. The RPI can access Twitter’s timeline globally and searches for tweets containing the term “COVID”. A python script uses the Twitter API to catch each tweet and sends it via OSC message to SuperCollider, where each character is converted to sound using a piano sample. The duration of the notes depends on the number of total characters on the tweet, whilst the spatial position of the sound is defined by the pitch: the higher the frequency, the higher the probability that it will move left or right on the sound field. We can also see the stream of data flowing in the window. Trying to read all the tweets.

In this installation, we can let this algorithmic non-human robot search for information about COVID-19 across Twitter to help us understand it faster than we could previously. But finding the data is not the only thing that is needed to do. After the use of this search robot, we need to find a way to absorb the content of each tweet that gives us information about the subject; we need to try to understand it. And if the cognitive way is not fast enough, we can try to absorb it with our other senses, like hearing and feel-ing it physically. Our body can then try to understand the speed of incoming information and adjust our brains to it, in an unconscious way of dealing with such a terrifying new disease that affected our entire way of living, spreading fear among families.

As our information distribution channels became and remain congested with the influx of data regarding COVID-19, with this artwork I hope to find and present to the public a new way of absorbing information and knowledge about it, using our senses to feel the data instead of trying to make sense of it rationally.