Curves & Reverbs IV
Curves & Reverbs IV is a participatory sound performance that retools affective computing technologies to expose and reconfigure the systems they were designed to serve. Instead of treating biometric data as emotionally legible input, the project transforms such metrics—pulse and skin conductance readings in this case—into a soundscape rendered in real time as participants collectively engage with video footage of socio-political events. These bodily signals, captured through a shared wearable passed between participants, modulate the sonic environment to stage a field of dissonant, intersubjective intensity. Foregrounding methods of data materialization and visceralization, the work resists the reductive tendencies of emotional AI and refuses normative frameworks of capture and recognition. By combining real-time sonification and sound modulation, Curves & Reverbs register collective, embodied response to devastating events on view without disclosing the context. In doing so, it points to global instances of crises circulating through (social) media, generating conflicting responses to point to complexity and unrecognizability of emotions. By shifting biosignals away from predictive classification toward shared aesthetic experience, Curves & Reverbs IV opens a space of relational and embodied emotional exchange. The performance undermines systems of affective control by reclaiming the body not as a source of emotional data, but as a site of co-presence, opacity, and collective sensing. In a time when emotional legibility is increasingly weaponized by sociotechnical infrastructures, the work poses a vital question: what alternative futures emerge when sensing systems are not about controlling and regulating, but can induce a sense of embodied interconnection?
