Apophenia (Dharavi)
2021, 2023/2026 version
Apophenia refers to the human tendency to perceive connections between phenomena that are not necessarily related: hearing a voice in the static of the radio, seeing a face in a cloud, or a sign in a flock of pigeons.
For nearly a decade, the Apophenia project has brought together birds, breeders, musicians, neuroscientists, and other participants around an experiment inspired by an ancient practice of pigeon fanciers. To protect their pigeons from birds of prey, some pigeon fanciers attach small whistles to them that produce a sound when the birds fly. Using these whistles, tuned to a specific scale, Robin Meier Wiratunga composes an open score that explores the sonic interactions between birds and musicians.
The film Apophenia (Dharavi), presented here for the first time, combines footage from a performance of Apophenia created in Mumbai in 2023 with a new sound interpretation conceived with the musicians of the Contrechamps ensemble.
As an artist and composer, Robin Meier Wiratunga explores forms of human, animal, and artificial intelligence through experiments that blend sound, science, and technology. Singing mosquitoes, synchronized fireflies, ants, neural networks, and pigeons that play instruments thus become the protagonists of musical experiments conducted in collaboration with scientists and laboratories. His work has been presented at venues including the Palais de Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou, the Shanghai Biennale, and the MIT Museum. A collaborator with Ircam, he teaches sound arts at the Bern University of the Arts and works with artists such as Björk, Holly Herndon, and Pierre Huyghe.