About this Event
Biodata Perturbations: Stimulus <-> Response
Track: Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement
Presented by BYO Print
This performance/demonstration brings together Samuel Cusumano, the open source engineer of biodata sonification (colloquially known as "plant music") together with Raúl Romero, a Philadelphia-based artist using biological data to create installation-based sculptures and soundscapes. The performance features plants acting as both sound sources and responders, driving music through both digital synthesis and physical percussion. As ambient sounds, the environment, and participating guests shape the acoustic landscape, we experiment with perturbing the plant and will see if the audience in turn gets perturbed. Does a houseplant have the capacity to perceive and respond? Or is the data captured from the plant just chaos logged in real time? Hear Cusumano speak to his original intent developing biodata sonification, and how artists like Romero have used his open source material to create unique projects in Philadelphia and around the world.
About the presenters
Sam Cusumano is a Philadelphia-based Engineer for the Arts, educator, and performance artist collaborating with curators, musicians, scientists, and students to build interactive public displays and open-source tools. Operating as Electricity for Progress, he is a pioneer in biodata sonification whose celebrated open source hardware translates plant biology into generative music for playful, immersive installations used by artists worldwide. Sam brings his passion for circuit bending and electronics modification to engaging, hands-on demonstrations that empower everyone to creatively understand how our technologies and tools work.
Raúl Romero is an artist working across sculpture, sound, and installation to explore how material and technology mediate our relationship to the environment and to each other. Drawing on technological histories, communication tools, ancient artifacts, and the mechanics of sound production, Romero treats sound as both subject and material — a force that can be heard, seen, and physically felt through vibration. He chooses materials for their conceptual charge: copper for its conductivity, steel for its industrial history and structural strength, wood for its rare fibrous quality — pairing them with technology to reveal the almost mystical logic of how things work, while raising questions about memory, the extractive histories of colonialism, and our environmental impact. Romero's practice, informed in part by his Puerto Rican heritage, treats sound as a bridge connecting past, present, and future.
ABOUT PARALLEL PLAY
The Parallel Play Symposium, presented as part of the six-week Collective Futures festival, is a two-day gathering of artists, scholars, organizers, and cultural workers exploring the practices, histories, and conditions that sustain collective cultural production. Through free panels, workshops, and performative presentations, participants will examine the cultural significance of collective art-making and artist-run spaces while sharing strategies for building and maintaining collaborative cultural infrastructures.
Organized around thematic tracks—including How To: Collective Tools & Tactics, Relational Infrastructures, “Have You Seen the ___?”: Memory and Collective Spaces, and Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement—the symposium will feature workshops, panels, performances, and conversations presented by ATUOMAT Collective, Luster Gallery + Studio, Obvious Agency, Vox Populi, Termite TV Collective, All Mutable, FORTUNE, FJORD, Big Ramp, Da Vinci Art Alliance, cinéSPEAK, Practice Gallery, and many other collaborators.
Registration is required for each session.
Event venue & nearby stays
Asian Arts Initiative, 1219 Vine St, Philadelphia, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.