Fo(u)r Conditions

Installation

This work proposes a sensitive and relational device, in which three forms of matter—water, moss, and sound—are connected in a continuous cycle of support and transformation. A bowl filled with water, through a simple cannula connected to an infusion set, sustains the life of moss placed on a second dish. Two sensors—monitoring humidity and temperature—enable the emergence of indistinct voices, acoustic phantoms rising from within the system itself. This sonic condition echoes the first murmurs of life, surfacing from a minimal environmental state, and returns the human condition to an ambiguous stage—past or future—yet one of undeniable dependence on water and plants.

In the early stages of life, despite the presence of geophony—the collection of abiotic yet natural sounds such as eruptions, landslides, winds, rain, or shifting ice—physiological silence was universal: living forms had not yet developed the sensory apparatus required to perceive acoustic waves. Perhaps only some primitive jellyfish or early cephalopods possessed a rudimentary sensitivity to vibration, as some existing species seem to suggest.

Listening to the world most likely began in water, with jawless organisms—agnathans—that, thanks to a series of modified scales along their bodies, were able to detect changes in water pressure and perhaps even low-frequency sounds. It was during the Silurian (443–419 million years ago) and Devonian (419–359 million years ago) periods that a turning point occurred: with the appearance of the first jawed fish—both cartilaginous, like today’s sharks, and bony, like sardines—true auditory structures also began to emerge. These animals could, for the first time, truly hear what was happening around them.

“[…] why emerge from individual silence? Why listen, why decipher a world whose sonic diversity increases little by little? What selective forces came into play that led to the emergence of ears?” asks Jérôme Sueur. “Thus, hearing begins with sensory vigilance, with attentiveness to an environment from which appetising or threatening sounds might arise. This auditory predisposition to detect survival indicators seems to be a deep-rooted atavism, still present in today’s species, including humans. It is also possible that the first sounds ever heard and listened to were used to locate and intercept others of the same species, particularly for encounters with sexual partners, though without any true communication. Hearing the other move may have helped to find and embrace them.”

Drawing on this deep genealogy of listening, I propose a living, minimal machine—a small ecosystem that responds to exchanges among its components. The moss, an ancient and resilient organism, becomes a transitional element between two worlds: on one side, the humidity that ensures its survival; on the other, the voice that translates its presence—a sound that affirms our dependence on photosynthetic organisms. And with water—emblem of the Earth and source of all life—this passage becomes one of the work’s most subtle hypotheses: listening is not a function, but a relationship.

This work is a tribute to Luigi Pagliarini, a key figure in the relationship between art and complex systems, who often sought connections between worlds—between the biological and the digital, the human and the non-human, art and code. The installation becomes a sentient organism, built upon fragile yet active equilibriums. Sound is not a by-product, but the living trace of an ecosystem at work. It is an invitation—now more urgent than ever—to inhabit the world through radical attentiveness. As in a sensitive organism, each part responds to the others. Nothing is isolated. Everything resonates, everything listens. To listen today is perhaps the most radical gesture—not to understand, but to realise that we exist only in relation.