Red Noise
RED NOISE is an interactive, wearable biodesign project developed in 2023 during the FEM_LAB
Exchange, a Catalonia–Austria artistic research residency between Hangar.org (Barcelona) and Mz Baltazar’s Lab (Vienna).
The project takes inspiration from Astrida Neimanis’ Body of Water, which challenges the idea of water as something external to the human body. Water is not “out there”: it is what we are made of.
According to Neimanis, how we understand water directly shapes how we treat it, and in turn how we treat ourselves, our kin, and our more-than-human kin. Water becomes a shared, relational medium that connects bodies, environments, infrastructures, and political histories.
Starting from this perspective, RED NOISE aims to create a symbiotic link between the human body, its fluids, and the surrounding environment, encouraging an active and visceral form of listening to the transformations happening within and around us: from climatic and ecological changes to social, political, and intimate dynamics. The project proposes a fluid, ecological, queer, and feminist approach to understanding bodies, sexuality, and the relationship between human and non-human systems.
The work takes the form of an interactive wearable bioprosthesis: a garment made from algae-based biomaterials, with biosensors embedded as extensions of the body. Human and non-human sounds, internal and external fluids, and environmental data are woven together into a living, responsive system. Around the wearable, glass containers hold water and fluids collected from local natural and human environments.
Visitors are invited to actively engage with the installation. Wearing headphones connected to a nearby computer, they take the sensors and immerse them into the different fluid-filled containers. The sensors measure parameters such as conductivity, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), and pH, analyzing the fluids in real time. The TDS sensor (normally used to measure the concentration of dissolved substances in water) is used symbolically to measure the “contamination of stigma” associated with taboo fluids. A pH sensor, measuring acidity and alkalinity, directly affects the distortion of sound.
All data is processed live through Pure Data, an open-source sound programming environment, and translated into audio. As sensor values change, pre-recorded voices are activated, modulated, and distorted. These voices narrate stories of pleasure, dissent, liberation, DIY gynecological practices, moving waters, squirting, and sexual oppression. Variations in pH progressively transform intelligible
speech into noise, until reaching a climax: a live noise “orgasm” in which individual voices dissolve into a collective sonic body.
Central to RED NOISE is the idea of contamination. Water contamination in the surrounding environment is measured and put in dialogue with bodily and sexual fluids that are socially considered taboo. Here, contamination is not framed solely as an environmental problem, but as a new connotation: a source of shared knowledge that reveals connections between stigma, pollution, control, and power. As contamination levels increase, voices and sounds accumulate, becoming progressively more distorted, reflecting a crescendo of stigma, tension, and resistance.
RED NOISE wants to open alternative forms of communication between internal and external fluids, bodies and environments, humans. The project invites participants to listen differently, to water, to bodies, and to forms of knowledge that are usually silenced, suggesting new ways of connecting intimacy, ecology, and collective experience.