Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks

Silicone soft robot

A Polyp is silicone soft robot that is used to train the  Demiurge raw audio synthesis engine. They sample their environments, upload them to the Cloud, and can retrieve and play back audio trained specifically against their sample set. Polyps are currently on display at Seed Gallery in Shenzhen, with upcoming commitments in Europe in 2024.

Some notes on Polyp:

Polyps take their name from the class of animal that the Hydra is, but they also reflect eggs within the human female reproductive system and also cancers, specifically uterine cancers but other cancers as well. Cancer is of course the ultimate biological reproductive material, a kind of simultaneous reproductive death-drive and absolute, categorical fertility and evolutionary potentiality. These Polyps sit on a bed of silicone plastered yak hair, intended to represent both nests and pubic hair.

Over the course of the exhibition, we expect Polyps to map and model the audio environment of the gallery, while at the same time imparting their own distinctive signatures within that space, raising, hopefully, the hackles of an audience member who is confronted, maybe for the first time very clearly, with the idea that they are constantly and irrevocably, with varying levels and dimensions of consent, not only with their environment but with the algorithmic reconsumption of their environment, ceaslessly and without pause. There are two ways to feel about it — horror, that one’s every thought is sampled and mobilized by partially incomprehensible and invisible forces, and — alternatively — a kind of strange solidarity with a humanity that is coparenting the future.