Kissing Nature Choir

Kissing Nature/Choir - Museum Belvedere Heerenveen, Oranjewoud festival 2025. Commissioned by European Culture Programme Metavenues/Beyond the Venue.

Can we envision new forms of empathic entanglement between humans, nature, and technology? In the context of an increasingly disembodied and polarized world, we explore the longing of shared embodied experience and intimate connection. Rather than casting humans as distant caretakers of nature through technology, Kissing (Nature) Choir places each on their own terms within an imagined empathic collaboration. Three speculative artworks push the boundaries between humans and plants, emotions, innovative AI, and brain technologies, entangled as co-actors within planetary ecologies of empathy.

1. KISSING NATURE (PHYSICAL SPACE). In a baroque architecture, a romantic mini-jungle of local plants (5x5 meters), participants are invited for intimate connections with each other and with the plants through kissing, and embracing. Their physical connections are measured through brain activity (E.E.G.) and plant biofeedback (including CO₂ and oxygen levels), recorded, visualized as a music score on monitors, and translated into a collective soundscape, live performed by musicians.
Art & science. This artwork makes use of research into how plants respond to human caring or aggressive gestures; and how sound and touch can influence their immune systems and growth (Hassanien 2014; Mishra and Bay 2019). Based o this research it explores (non-)human multi-sensory biofeedback intra-action between plant sensitivity and human acts of kissing and caressing, AI transformed into a sonic immersive synthesis (Donna Haraway 2016, Karen Barad, Latour 1990).

2. The KISSING NATURE/CHOIR (HYBRID) performance installation invites the audience as new members of a Non-human Growing Choir. Participants co-create a sonic 'voice' - a musical composition - together with a generative AI system, through gestures of kissing and caressing that are data-visualized (based on proximity and time) as a music score, which are then sonified by the dedicated AI. Each new 'voice' is exposed and collected in a 3d virtual public space, merging with past and new participant voices across the world.
3. KISSING CHOIR (ONLINE) is an experiment into online settings, that enable people at home to participate in remote public events, such as in theatres, museums and festivals.
Different from performance 2, participants kiss and caress both in front of their laptop cameras at home and at the public events. Their intimate gesture-data are visually exposed in the 3d space while the 'voices' sonically merge, to create a shared sense of embodied experience. Developed with: 'MetaVenues/Beyond the venue' (click here for video).