Matteo Marangoni – Chorusing Symbionts

In July, Chorusing Symbionts will be on display in the city garden at Marres. The work consists of a group of artificial beings that communicate with one another and are fully integrated into their environment. These beings, designed specifically for public gardens and parks, generate spatial electronic music that invites listeners to pay closer attention to their surroundings. They draw energy from their immediate environment, blending seamlessly into the landscape as if they have always belonged there. When you listen, you experience how technology and nature merge into a new form of music—an invitation to look, listen, and connect more consciously with the world around you.

Chorusing Symbionts is a project exploring whether music can bridge the worlds of humans, robots, and animals. It does so within the field of ecoacoustics, which studies how sound functions in nature. The project draws inspiration from emerging ideas in artificial intelligence and bioacoustics, particularly how animals communicate through sound. It envisions a future where new artificial beings coexist naturally with real animals, akin to a form of embodied, sensory science fiction.

At the heart of this project lies a key question: Can we use the current focus on artificial intelligence (which often centers only on human intelligence) to develop a broader understanding of intelligence? And can we learn from nature how different species coexist peacefully, thereby contributing to a more balanced relationship between humans and the biosphere?