TRANSDUCERS is an installation composed of several transparent glass tubes hanging at eye-level through the space. In the course of preparation, hair samples that have been collected from different individuals have been implanted into the custom-made laboratory tubes. A single human hair – merely physical debris on the face of it, but given the possibility of bioscientific analysis it becomes elevated to the state of a significant information carrier with individual-related explanatory power.
TRANSDUCERS seeks to mimic bioscientific processes. The object under investigation – the human hair – is triggered by the machinery and is stimulated to react. This reaction is registered, amplified and transduced into an audible output that implicitly encodes the hair samples’ physiological constitution. Each of the devices generates a unique sound based on each donors’ individual specimen.
TRANSDUCERS aims at questioning the dominance of science in describing life and its basic units. Every audible result provides a technological representation of identity based on the inserted human material – produced by an arrangement that points beyond itself to a superordinate reference system unknown to the visitors; freely oscillating between life and laboratory work, between individuality and serialization, between biology and its technoscientifical appropriation.

Header image: Max Schroeder

Photo credit: Bande für Gestaltung @ ISEA2010RUHR, Germany

Photo credit: LEAP Berlin, 2013