Cymatic Adufe in Lisbon
Documentation and details of the Cymatic Adufe, exhibited as part of the 21st Century Rural Museum in MUDE – Museu do Design e da Moda, Lisbon, 16 May to 31 August 2013.
Cymatic Adufe by Lewis Sykes
In the centre of the gallery space stands a 0.4m square, 2.3m tall column – the bottom half laminated in natural cork the top half of clear acrylic. A speaker is fitted into the lower section and above this, fixed part way up the acrylic, sits an adufe – a traditional square tambourine of Arabic origin. A compact micro-projector is mounted into the top of the column and projects onto the skin of the adufe below.
The work deploys Cymatics – the study of wave phenomenon and visible sound and vibration – to visualise the traditional folk melody of the Senhora do Almortão as dynamic and shifting patterns on the surface of the adufe. Simultaneously projected onto the adufe, superimposing on and augmenting these natural cymatics forms, are digital versions of the geometric patterns often found in traditional Portuguese decorative design and architectural elements. By revealing a previously hidden aspect of nature, the Cymatic Adufe tries to re-capture something of the sense of awe and wonder in the world around us and show how traditional perspectives tried to explain it.
Additional Notes
As is frequently the case with media artworks, the Cymatic Adufe as first exhibited in Porto work was a prototype. It’s subsequent exhibition in Lisbon gave me the opportunity to stabilise and refine it. Details of these developments feature in a Refining the Cymatic Adufe post on my Tumblr Digital Sketchbook.
Links
- Documentation on the making of the work is featured in a previous post – Cymatic Adufe in Porto.
- A Planning for the Cymatic Adude post – a rough collection of notes, links and research that show some of the thinking behind the development of the work – is on my Tumblr Digital Sketchbook.
- 21st Century Rural Museum exhibition catalogue 2012. English version
And some documentation on Scribd, Vimeo and Flickr:
Created with flickr slideshow.
