iii Sensory Kit #3 - Komorebi

Matteo Marangoni and Dieter Vandoren
Sound Creature

To order see our shop here.

This iii sensory kit is an environmental audiovisual instrument that generates music from the moving shadows of trees. You can bring it with you on a walk to the park or put it in your garden and listen to how the music changes in tune with the weather.

On purchasing this kit you also have the option of signing up to the Komorebi online workshop on May 30th. In this workshop the artists will talk about the project and will guide you in how to develop it further by modifying the open source hardware and software. This option is available only for orders received up to and including May 24th (if ordering from abroad please consider longer postage times).

Komorebi is a Japanese word that can be translated as “sunlight filtered by trees”. It refers to the shadow play that we find on the forest floor when going for a walk in the woods on a sunny day. The mystery of this image is that an apparently simple shadow play conceals in fact a great deal of complexity. The movement of winds, clouds and the sun, the patterns of growth in vegetation, are all living in this projection. This image suggests to us that “life” or “aliveness” is not an exclusive property of organic life forms, it is also a property of complex systems that go beyond individual organisms or biological life as we understand it. How can we translate this image into music?

Inspired by the historical precedent of the Fluxkits published by Fluxus Editions in the 60s and 70s, iii Sensory Kits deliver physical, experiential artworks to your doorstep. The kits are original artworks, instruments, compositions and sensory exploration devices which conveniently travel in the mail to be assembled and put to use yourself, either at home or in your daily environment.

The first three iii Sensory Kits include Wen Chin Fu’s sugar instrument ‘Tang’, Lauren Jetty’s perfume ‘ArtScience Body’ and Matteo Marangoni and Dieter Vandoren’s audiovisual device ‘Komorebi’. The packaging of the kits is designed by Koen de Groot and Mihalis Shammas. 

iii Sensory Kits are developed with financial support of the Creative Industries Fund NL, the Municipality of The Hague and the Performing Arts Fund NL and presented in collaboration with Laaktheater and Rewire Festival.

Komorebi is an ongoing project developed by Matteo Marangoni and Dieter Vandoren starting in 2020. A first version titled Komorebi Larva DIY Kit was commissioned and released by Into The Great Wide Open in the summer of 2020 in the format of a DIY electronics kit.

This iii sensory kit, produced in the spring 2021, comes fully assembled in a compact portable design and is ready to use. Compared to the version from 2020, this kit has its own PCB, a 16 bit DAC and selfcalibrating light sensor input and new sound synthesis and behaviour code. 

This kit is developed with the assistance of Daan Johan (PCB design), Riccardo Marogna (DSP programming) and Mihalis Shammas (Digital Fabrication) and is commissioned by iii. Komorebi is being developed further as a swarm of electronic creatures which will soon inhabit parks and forests in larger groups (scheduled to premiere in the second half of 2021). Komorebi is developed with the support of the Creative Industries Fund NL, Into the Great Wide Open, Crossing Parallels and Highlight Festival (TU Delft) and Stichting Stokroos.