CAMANCHACA
and zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook, New York
Camanchaca is a sensitive space where living entities interact, modify, and transform the acoustic landscape through their physical bodies and internal fluids.
The soundscape is an uncontrolled, chaotic feedback loop built upon a closed radio transmission. The receivers are deliberately untuned to yield noise and interference. "Static is the sound of the universe," a radio astronomer in Calle Larga, Chile, remarked years ago while listening to solar storms. In this installation, noise is everything at once: an entanglement of signals of technology and natural phenomena existing in raw democracy.
The system is inherently unstable. Water droplets strike rocks, making sound emerge through custom bioplastic membranes that propose alternative methods of making technology. Everything is exposed in a deliberate mess: wires, electricity, bioplastics, rocks, and water. Camanchaca operates within this central contradiction: presenting speculative alternatives to harvest water and alternative biomaterials, while keeping the physical, heavy presence of technological infrastructure undeniably visible.
Camanchaca is a sound art installation that explores water as both an ecological resource and a vessel for collective memory. The project draws inspiration from 1990s Chilean desert irrigation techniques, where rudimentary mesh nets harvested dense coastal fog, causing their threads to "weep" water into the arid landscape.
In this installation, atmospheric humidity is captured using a custom thermoelectric fog harvester that forces condensation and freezing. As the frost melts, the runoff drains into a series of custom-built speakers fabricated from algae-based bioplastics. These containers house saline solutions; as water drops fall, the changing salinity conductively closes an electrical circuit, activating tactile sound transducers.
The resulting soundscape intertwines radio signals captured by a seawater antenna with a live feedback loop from a closed radio system. This system is modulated directly by the physical presence of the audience, whose body water acts as an organic antenna that alters the radio frequencies upon approach.
What is the force and agency of a single drop of water? For agriculture in northern Chile, a drop harvested from the camanchaca signifies olive groves, vegetation, and life. In this work, water serves as a vital medium of connection and communication, the engine of an inefficient sentient system.
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Mesh Arts Center, Brooklyn
