Juan Duarte Regino. Augury: Hybrid Listening and Atmospheric Attunement exhibition, 2023. RIXC Gallery. Photo: Juris Rozenbergs
The artist Juan Duarte Regino developed the Augury: Hybrid Listening and Atmospheric Attunement generative and interactive media installation, exhibited at RIXC Gallery, the program featuring the performance by the artist.
Juan Duarte Regino is a Mexican artist based in Finland and doctoral researcher in Aalto University, who works with environmental sound to explore sensing in-between nature and technology. To create methods for augmented listening, and attunement to atmospheric processes that expand our human sensorium.
https://juanduarteregino.com/
Augury: Hybrid Listening and Atmospheric Attunement. Exhibition at the RIXC Gallery, 2023
The generative and interactive media installation has been inspired by ancient meteorology and modern methods of weather sensing to extend our perception of atmospheric processes, based on ancient Greek-Roman and Aztec divination practices, symbols and methods of weather observation and prediction.
To sense atmospheric processes we can use our own body and technologies to translate their energies into human perception. This exhibition presents experiments with modern and ancient practices to sense and predict atmospheric processes, to perceive the intangible and contingent properties of the surrounding air.
Augury is the name of an ancient practice of divination based on observing birds’ behavior to predict future events and make decisions. Their agency as a species with airborne capacity has been regarded in the past as messengers from beyond. Augury is used as the title of this media installation, which is inspired by some ancient methods for sensing and predicting the weather.
Hybrid Listening is a proposal to combine meteorological knowledge that reassures human sentience, and implement technical cognition systems for attuning and listening to our atmosphere. From ancient meteorology this exhibition looks into two cases of technologies for sensing and predicting atmospheric processes from a deep time perspective: The parapegmata and the obsidian mirror.
The parapegmata, an inscription surface to register and predict weather in relation to astronomical events, was used across ancient Greek-Roman cities to represent time cycles as sequences and combinatory events to forecast the weather. It was used to follow and guide the weather events, winds, festivals, appearances of birds, and the rising of rivers. In that sense, animal behavior and other natural phenomena were observed to indicate specific weather conditions linked to the movement of planets and stars.
The obsidian stones and mirror correspond to the Aztec myth of Tezcatlipoca (which means “smoking mirror”) a deity who was associated with the wind, the unconscious, and the art of divination. Looking and touching this obsidian mirror and stones is a way to perceive what is beyond our human capacities. In this case, to extend our listening beyond our body and through the sensing networks implemented in this installation.
Sensor data is obtained from outside the gallery, and it is used to drive an interactive composition that is transformed with an interface that resembles the Parapegmata and the smoking mirror to propose an alternative understanding of climate with contemporary technologies. In this sense, atmospheric processes are sensed within perceptual phenomena including wind direction, temperature, and electromagnetism.
Perceiving our atmosphere from divination means to contemplate our surroundings in search of answers to these questions: is connecting ancient and modern worldviews a way to look into the future, or a way to reveal, what is invisible here in our present moment?
Juan Duarte Regino. Augury: Hybrid Listening and Atmospheric Attunement exhibition, 2023. RIXC Gallery. Photo: Juris Rozenbergs
The residency was concluded with the Augury presentation and performance by the artist at the RIXC Gallery on June 14, 2023. The artist performed a sonic intervention using the installation Augury through real-time sensors outside the gallery sensing atmospheric registers, wind force, pressure and temperature to control a ritualistic divination of the surrounding weather. After performance the artist presented the project developed during the residency.
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY PROGRAM
RIXC Art, Science & Techno-Ecologies Residency program featuring three Art, Science and Techno-Ecologies residencies, two-month each, for Baltic and Nordic artists took place at RIXC in Riga, Latvia, during the time period from February 1, 2023 until March 31, 2024, supported by Nordic Culture Point.
The Residency Program took place for Baltic and Nordic artists who work on the edge of art, science and techno-ecologies, exploring the complex relations between the human, nature and digital technologies, and focusing on new concepts such as “naturecultures”, “sensing environments”, “living technologies”, “terrestrial coexistence”, “naturally / artificial intelligences”, which recently have been re-examined at the heart of our society.
RIXC Center for New Media Culture has received mobility funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish RIXC Art Science Residencies.
