Transonic I NODE SESSION IV

Transonic — NODE Session IV
The Space, Kurfürstendamm, Berlin

The piece begins with a list. Several hundred species, extinct and endangered, each held in the archive as a scientific name, a common name, and whatever photographic record survives of it. Nothing else. No footage, no hand-authored assets, no imagery brought in from outside the dataset. Everything that appears on screen is that archive rendered under different conditions.

The performance moves through three states. The first is the index: raw binomials layered over instanced geometry, more text than the eye can process. This is how loss is actually stored, as a database entry, legible and unreadable at once. The second is the atlas, where the photographic record is placed onto a torus, each species a disc, the lines between them drawn from relations in the data rather than placed for composition. For a few minutes the archive holds a shape you can walk around, something between a constellation and an anatomy. The third is dispersal. The geometry reduces to points and comes apart under live audio, and the system loses its hold on the records it was built from.

What interests us is the distance between a taxonomy and a body. A list is easy to look away from. A form that assembles itself from real records and then dissolves while you are watching is harder to dismiss, and that difficulty is the argument the work is making. The piece does not illustrate extinction or ask for a response to it. It performs the archive's own indifference and lets the audience supply what the archive cannot.

Built in TouchDesigner with custom GLSL for the point and post passes. There is no fixed timeline. Sound and image run off the same signal chain, so each performance produces a different reading of the same set of records.

Credits

Transonic — Rahul Sharma and Daniel Rudolf
Visuals and system design: Rahul Sharma
Sound: Daniel Rudolf
Photography: Claudia Montesi
Presented at NODE Session IV, hosted at The Space, Kurfürstendamm, Berlin