Lestes

Same-day delivery; just-in-time computing; instagrammable art; attention span; AI assistants. In the global north, life and work have converged around an obsession with immediacy – a techno-fascist paradigm where a rhetoric of speed, optimization, and measurable output flattens affective experience, devalues interpersonal contact, and fuels extractive platforms. Lestes MK1 invites audiences to slow down and immerse themselves in the messy feeling of intimately sensing another body; an experience of intercorporeal vulnerability.

The artwork's centrepieces are three biomechanical organs resting on plinths. They leverage biomechanical aspects of human anatomy to transmit sound through the viscera rather than the ears. Tentacular, bone-like and cyber-organic, their form conjures an ancient otherworldly body part, a symbol of a yet-unimagined embodiment. As a visitor picks up an organ and holds it against their chest and neck, tentacles spread onto embedded acoustic transducers, blurring the line between symbiosis and parasitism.

In standalone mode a custom AI trained on the artist’s heartbeat, respiration and blood flow generates a sound composition the organs diffuse inside visitors’ bodies. Visitors do not hear the sound but perceive it internally; sound is multidimensional, spread within the body by bone conduction, haptics, and resonances of internal flesh tissues. In a somatic experience both magical and uncanny, bodies become amplifiers.

 

During an activation, visitor encounter a masked performer sitting among the plinths. Donning a ceremonial eyeless mask resembling the organs and wearing a biosensor on its heart, the creature seeks the visitors’ touch. As their hands meet, the organs transmit live sounds from the creature’s body into the visitor’s. As subtle hand contact unfolds a micro-choreography of closeness, their bodies merge in a poetic suspension.