Hush Glitches

Info

Hush Glitches is a transdisciplinary performative installation positioned at the junction of ecological crisis and technological representation, and exploring our active role in what is legible and what is lost. The installation challenges anthropocentric hierarchies by framing endemic Romanian plants – meticulously reconstructed as digital twins – as interlocutors in a dialogue mediated by technology. These plants do not wilt out of sadness or dance in imitation of humans. Their subtle, data-driven responses are grounded in real-time biological logic from sensors connected to the performer, transgressing interspecies interpretations

A solitary performer navigates this digital landscape in a choreography that mirrors the search for new ways to connect to non-human life: deliberate, detached, and inquisitive. The dancer becomes a catalyst and disruptor, whose actions feed data to a generative audio-visual landscape, while the plants’ responses form a map of their unreadability.

The core theme is the silent disconnect: the rupture between human progress and vegetal consciousness, an underlying tension between the botanical world (and their digital twins), and the performer’s movements. It explores two key questions related to human existence in a more-than-human world: Can we relate to non-human life without colonizing it with our metaphors? And can we mourn extinction without reducing the extinct to symbols?

Through multidisciplinary collaboration, building upon Weick’s Sensemaking Theory, the project operates at several distinct layers that are fundamental to understanding humanity’s role in the ecological systems of our planet – be these systems natural, technological or social:

• Politics of non-understanding: The work foregrounds the limits of human understanding and the failure of our language to grasp radical Otherness. What could the socio-political power dynamic be in refusing to translate into human terms the alterity of plants? How can this refusal become a form of artistic and ecological resistance? 
• Embodiment and technological mediation: The performer’s body acts as a source of unintended consequences. How does the mediated, data-driven experience of the body challenge or reinforce the sensory deprivation and disconnection felt in technologically abundant urban environments?
• Relational ethics and data translation: When biological processes are translated into computational data, how does the act of encoding alter our ethical relationship with non-human entities? Does rendering an organism as a digital twin serve its conservation or does it merely offer a symbolic substitute for physical engagement and responsibility?

Blending generative sound, choreography, and 3D representations of endangered Romanian plants, Hush Glitches proposes a radical shift: leveraging technology not as a tool for detachment, but as a medium to expose the failure of communication between humanity and the non-human intelligence of flora.