Author: malina

A Freak in the Creek by Aleksander Tendjer is a multisensory installation exploring human connection with water through sound and touch. Set around a living river environment, the work invites participants to experience the river physically — through its movements, textures, rhythms, and vibrations.

Using submerged listening devices and wearable tactile elements, the installation transforms underwater river sounds into gentle sensations on the body. As visitors sit or stand beside the water, subtle pulses across the skin create an experience that feels both meditative and uncanny.

By translating environmental sound into touch, A Freak in the Creek creates an immersive space for deep listening and sensory connection with the natural world.

The Self Defense project by Karolina Żyniewicz is inspired by Noah Whiteman’s book Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins—From Spices to Vices (as well as other similar publications), which demonstrates how many organisms develop defensive strategies that can be adapted by humans as a broadly understood form of self-defense.
In the face of contemporary global threats, Karolina sees an urgent need to engage in dialogue about defensive practices—both physical and psychological—grounded in knowledge of nature.
Such knowledge, like any other, entails ethical responsibility. As Paracelsus observed: the dose makes the poison.
She is interested in how plants considered poisonous use toxins within their life cycles and interspecies relationships, and how these toxins may be used—or misused—by humans.
Her interests focus on the thresholds and doses that mark the boundary between therapeutic potential and danger, where a plant substance shifts from a protective agent to a deadly tool.

The Self Defense project develops simultaneously on several levels:
1. Work with source materials and consultations with botanists, phytosociologists, and chemists.
2. Workshop-based activities that symbolically refer to the folk tradition of knowledge transmission in rural communities—knowledge once held by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers about the power of plants and other organisms—incorporating embroidery as a craft of quiet resistance (supported by the recollections of women in shelters during wartime).
3. The creation of a performative installation of resistance. This part is inspired by a multisensory experience in a shelter in the town of Kranj, Slovenia, and by a story heard there about how women, through sewing and embroidery, fought fear and tried to maintain a semblance of normality for their children while remaining in the shelter, experiencing air raids and bombings with their entire bodies. Creating the installation requires the use of sounds from the shelter as well as vibrations. An essential element of the installation is also an alarm instrument based on measuring threshold doses of a given plant-derived substance (dose per kilogram of body weight). The first experiments with solutions intended for use in the installation took place during the AreHolland residency in Enschede.

Project is supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Do you like synthesizers but don’t want to compose your own music? And do you also live in a rainy country? Jessica Stanley is a researcher working with e-textiles and has a solution for you: a raincoat that generates sound when raindrops fall on it. At PIFcamp, she will experiment with different flexible and textile moisture sensor designs, using a mix of hydrophobic (waterproof) and hydrophilic (absolutely not waterproof) fabrics to move water through sensors and create interesting sounds. These will then be connected to simple analog synthesizer circuits and integrated into a raincoat to make a garment that creates its own soundtrack during a walk in the rain.

Jessica is currently a postdoctoral researcher based in the UK and works on medical research projects combining textiles and electronics. However, she is also interested in how textiles can make interesting interfaces for electronic devices and in projects that make electronics accessible to a wider audience. This will be her first time at PIFcamp, and she is keen to collaborate with others who have more experience on the audio electronics side of things, or to share her e-textile knowledge with others.

Every time we look into the starry sky, we are looking into the past. The further we go in observing space, the further back in time we travel. Astronomical observations of deep time are based on the spectroscopy of very distant objects that emit or absorb visible light, such as stars, galaxies, and black holes. With microwave emissions, cosmic rays, and gamma-ray bursts from supernovas and other transient objects, we can also trace distant times, but these emissions are better detected from outer space.

In her current research project, which started during the Astronomia residency in the mountains of Portugal and at the Haute Provence Observatory in France, artist Katarina Petrović is exploring material and immaterial ways of journeying into deep cosmic times. During PIF, she will look for traces of deep time detectable and collectable on the ground, break sunlight to observe the solar spectral absorptions in real time, and attempt to record cosmic rays using CCD image sensors. She will use a small magnetic loop antenna to search for and listen to the cosmic radio noise coming from the center of the Milky Way, and look for stardust or micrometeors – very small meteor particles left over from larger pieces burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Katarina Petrović (NL/RS) is an artist and researcher working with language, computation and various physical phenomena including sound, vacuum, light and radio. She creates systems, procedural works that are presented as modular installations in an online and offline space, using media such as generative text, poetry, sound, software and performance. She holds a MMus degree from ArtScience Interfaculty, Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague and an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Belgrade. Katarina is an affiliated researcher at the trans-disciplinary research Centre Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and a guest lecturer at the postgraduate School of Thinking, VUB and ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague. She has been the managing director of Trixie, an artist run space in the Hague since 2021 and is co-initiator of ArtScience Forum platofrm and Femkanje – art radio in Belgrade.