Grégory Lasserre & Anaïs Met Den Ancxt are media artists and together form the Scenocosme (http://www.scenocosme.com/), a group interested in contemporary artworks and that explores possible hybridizations between the technology and the living world (plants, stones, water, wood, humans,..) in order to produce innovative sensitive and poetic sonorous and/or visual languages. In “Reactive Matter”, they work with “Programmable Matter”, a research project that aims to create a new smart system made from a hardware component and a software approach that will enable the creation of basic blocks of programmable matter — a matter made from centimetre-size modules attached together and able to move. In other words, the project is interested in a programmable matter capable of changing its physical properties according to an internal or external action, and it will do this by working with a programmable matter composed of micro-robots, sub-millimetre moving computers that will have the ability to move around each other, communicate, change colour, and latch to other micro-robots to form different shapes.

Scenocosme aimed to approach “Programmable Matter” as a good opportunity to develop new interactive artworks which explore the quality of real and virtual touch, and its various significances. They proposed to work on links between natural elements and objects with virtual sounds, lights or images. Several questions lighted up the development of their work in “Reactive Matter”: what kind of poetic and symbolic relationships can the electronic clay create? How it is possible to build, to sculpt an intuitive and evolutive musical score with blocks? Where each “molecule” could be used in a scoring model? How is it possible to link several objects together? To create a singular network?  To gather several spectators in a performance?

At the end of the residency, Scenocosme presented an interactive light and sound behavioural installation, composed of more than 120 independent cellular robotic structures that are linked together. Each of the 120 electronic cells is retroactive. They emit different sounds, rhythms and light intensities in response to the audience stimuli. Sensitive, robotic bases also influence each other, between neighbouring cells, like cooperative living organisms. “Rhizome” is inspired by the communication and spatial arrangement of plants, corals, termites, fireflies, micro-organisms, etc.

Read the final report