DXARTS GAllery Research Exhibition 2025

Shedding Senses

Ongoing Research Kinetic Sensing Scultpures

2026

Maria Thrän
University of Washington

This project represents the first stage of a larger body of work which explores how voice, material (latex), and electromagnetic fields can form relational sensing systems.

Focus is to investigate multiple technical pathways that will later converge into a sculptural-performance ecology.

These early experiments allowed to test how fragile, changeable materials—latex, copper, graphite, magnets, embedded lights—might become instruments capable of sensing, transmitting, and transforming vibration.

research exhibition DXARTS Gallery 2025

Material explorations:
Throughout these tests, Latex darkens, curls, cracks, and gradually sheds; graphite drifts and fractures; coils interfere unpredictably. Instead of stabilizing these behaviors, they define the project’s aesthetic and conceptual direction.The materials themselves produce the sonic and visual language: soft vibration, internal brightness, noisy modulation, fragile resonance.

These qualities reflect what describe the larger research as “voice as both transmitter and sensor”—a system where sound, touch, and material decay co-produce knowledge.

In the long-term project, these membranes, sensors, antennas, and light components will enter into dialogue with environmental forces such as river magnetism, humidity, and moving water.

The prototypes developed here are fragments—early organs of a future instrument that will perform through washing, shedding, and singing in relation to a nonhuman field.

By designing systems that listen with rather than listen to their surroundings, I continue to build toward a practice rooted in care, permeability, and shared sensing across bodies, materials, and environments.

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Thrän's artistic focus lies at the intersection of visual arts, music, and experimental research. Her works reflect on ecological and social dimensions and always incorporate the diverse relationships between space and body.

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