Audiovisual work co-created by Rubén Bañuelos, Verônica Gesteira, & Keigo Yoshida. Performed at Sónar

"The digital is not immaterial, certainly not ethereal; it is as physical as the raw mines of silicon or iron that allow for computing to blossom. Instrumentalizing AI (sonically or otherwise) must be a process that accounts for the technology’s own physicality through critical design. Mineral Neurons is as much of a sound piece as it is a modular instrument: infrasound gets captured by a tight plastic membrane (an acoustic object called CLSTR1), producing acoustic distortion effects with the metal bowls on top, which in turn travel through space. Their trajectory gets then tracked by a hand-held webcam and processed for coordinate mapping. These acoustic distortions get captured via a hand-held microphone and operated through real-time timber-transfer AI models. The physical output of Mineral Neurons (ie: the visual movement of the bowls, the acoustic distortion) gets digested by neural networks and digital processing, allowing for the instrument-piece to grow its own audio-visual prosthetics." - Rubén Bañuelos