Sónar+D kicks off festival weekend with creative experiments to explore

Sónar+D is a digital lab that encourages participants to move beyond passive consumption of technology and actively participate. 

Kicking off one of the world's biggest electronic music festivals, taking place this Thursday-Saturday in Fira Gran Via, Sónar+D is the daytime, ideas-focussed side of the festival.

On display are dozens of installations and exhibitions, mixing and playing with the boundaries of human life and nature. 

From music generated in real-time from a participant's brainwaves, light panels based on a plant moss's humidity levels, unique and unrepeateable art from a vending machine, Sónar+D offers a world to discover.

Artists, digital creators, and creative directors were on site in Llotja de Mar to help reclaim the human elements in the increasingly technological world, through exhibitions, panels, workshops or performances.

The day kicked off with an inaugural concert from improvisational jazz pianist Ignasi Terraza performing alongside professor Philippe Salembier using AI tools.

Installations

One of the interactive exhibitions on show is that of Keigo Yoshida, and his Liberated Frequencies installation.

The installation works by attaching an EEG headset to the participant which generates music in real-time based on the brainwaves scanned.

"If a feeling of pleasure is detected, the sound heard by the participant changes," Yoshida explained, adding that the music "changes as the subject's feelings change." 

"Then the first sound is like the sounds of a rainy forest in Japan that I recorded," said Yoshida. The music will be "disrupted by the brainwave in real-time."

Another installation looks at the data privacy and the information that each person puts into the world by accepting terms and conditions without reading it, and what that really means. 

Araya Wongwan and Eliza Struthers-Jobin were showing off the scale of these terms and conditions that people usually accept without thought by printing them on receipt paper that in many cases stretched for longer than 4 metres.

"We're trying to question true consent, if it's like real consent, if you never really agreed or read the entire terms and conditions of daily products that we use, like WhatsApp, Google or Uber, even Vodafone," said Wongwan. 

"We have tried to select different kinds of services like dating apps, social media apps, search engines or even internet infrastructure to see and go through the criteria of how extractive it is to us and then this physicality of printing receipts is just for people to understand how long it is of all the things that we have signed away without knowing."

Elsewhere, Berlin native Niklas Roy was exhibiting a vending machine that produced unique and unrepeating artworks for €1. 

With the input of the time and date, therefore never repeating, an algorithm transformed this data into a line drawing.

Looking at the machine, people saw an ever-evolving creation, but once a €1 coin is inserted, the machine gets to work on printing the design displayed in that instant, and using a felt-tip pen, reproduced it on paper that can be taken home.  

Music festival

Sónar+D kicks off a weekend with more than 100 musical artists for Sónar Barcelona. 

Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 5pm until 7am Sonar will feature a variety of musical artists including The Prodigy, Skepta, Charlotte de Witte, Cabaret Voltaire and many others.

Located at Fira Gran Via, Thursday will have four states available for attendees to enjoy a variety of sounds. 

Two more stages will be introduced for Friday and Saturday, totaling to six spaces attendees can enjoy the music. Three stages will be outdoors and three indoors.