An interactive installation created during the Inria creative Hackathon 2021.

From the 22th to the 27th of August 2021, I participated to the Inria Creartathon, a hackathon combining art and science “where multi-disciplinary teams of five students collaborate on the design of an intelligent interactive object”.

Our team members were:

  • Alexandre Boiron from Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva
  • Elna Aurand from École Boulle
  • Hervé de Saint Blancard from Beaux-Art de Paris
  • Junhang Yu from Université Paris Saclay
  • Me, Téo Sanchez, PhD student in Inria.
The sculpture exhibited at the end of the week.

Pitch and narratives

Whereas Artificial Intelligence has always tried to mimick human behavior, it often fails to reproduce organic and responsive reactions of living beings. We created living organism in a transparent shell that can respond sound stimuli.

Inspirations: Pakui Hardware, Floryan Varennes, Ittah Yoda, Ernesto Neto, Jesse Darling, Anicka Yi.

A new organism was found on the Plateau Saclay. It is highly sensitive to sound and human voice. You are invited to converse and create an intimate interaction with it. YYou can whisper, whistle or talk to the sculpture and it will react it’s own way.

How it works

Cor Epiglottae has a body shell made of a melted acrylic plastic sheet. Its skin and organs were made in silicone and animated with a controlled water circuit. It captures sounds with a microphone hidden on its tail. The sound is synthesized using Cantor Digitalis, a physical model synthesis of vocal folds, throat and mouth created by researchers in Paris Saclay (LIMSI) and Sorbonne Université (Institut Jean le Rond d’Alembert). For the stimulus-response association, we used a Machine Learning model trained on our own collected data.

Material used

  • Acrylic plastic sheet
  • Silicone
  • Fabric fillings
  • Water circling system
We got inspirations from the Plateau de Saclay botanic greenhouse while discussing the scenography and the sculpture texture.
We got inspirations from the Plateau de Saclay botanic greenhouse while discussing the scenography and the sculpture texture.
Alexandre Boiron, Hervé de Saint Blancard et Anaïs Legros gathered around a silicon modl of a future organ.
Our team

Acknowledgement

Thank you to the Creartathon organizer and the partners. Thank you to all the people I had the chance to meet during this week!