Michel Serres in his book The Parasite defines the parasite as a microbe, an insidious
infection that takes without giving and weakens without killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food.
The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interferance in a channel. These seemingly dissimilar activities are, according to
Michel Serres, not merely coincidentally expressed by the same word (in French). Rather, they are intrinsically related and, in fact , thay have
the same basic function in a system.
Para[site], is a project in which an architectual space is infected by Autonomous Electromechanical Instruments which feed off their host by physically
striking the structures of the building for sound generation.
It is our aim to combine a number of such devices distributed throughout space
into a musical unity. To avoid lapses into cacophony, this will require the
development of a synchronization mechanism utilizing timers or perhaps some
primitive sort of decentralized networking. Also, through the use of like
sensors, a group of devices will respond to a global environmental event in
concert. Thus, something like the rising sun or a creaking door could be used
to synchronize an instrument group.
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