LUCA : Last Universal Common Ancestor

(2018)     

          Interactive 4-channel Audio Installation @ the Audiovisual Arts Festival, Corfu, Greece    

          Concept Design / Programming: Emmanouel Rovithis

          Sound / Algorithm Design: Christina Avdoula, Dimitris Geliniotis, Nikos Gkakios, Olga Kelemeni, Chrysanthi Matsagka, Konstantinos Milonas, Konstantinos Nikolaou, Savvas Panagiotou, Marios Papamanolis, Pinelopi Passakou, Fotini Pournara, and Xanthos Tsafalopoulos 

          "LUCA: Last Universal Common Ancestor" is the project of the 2017-18 spring semester course "Digital Sound Processing" at the Dept. of Audio & Visual Studies of the Ionian University. In that course students were taught the stages of Analog-to-Digital-Conversion, as well as the function and structure of various Digital Sound Processors. The course was comprised of 13 lectures and 8 laboratory sessions.

The project's concept is that an [ADC+DSP] system is correlated to a living organism in terms that the former receives an analog signal and applies digital effects through processing modules, just as the latter receives stimuli from the outside world and processes them through its inner organs. All students started off with the mono-cellular LUCA and designed the evolution of their organism by improving its ADC-fidelity, whereas making its DSP-algorithm more complex, through 3 stages: prokaryotic, eukaryotic, and multicellular. The tracks featured here are indicative examples of each stage's audio action:

Prokaryotic:

Eukaryotic:

Multicellular:

LUCA was presented as an interactive 4-channel installation at the Audiovisual Arts Festival 2018. The audience could stand in the centre of the room and choose from the available evolution stages, thus stochastically triggering the respective sounds.