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Live Streamings from Dolmens: DNA-Performance-Installation-Soundart

 

Marcello Mercado

Live Streamings from Dolmens, 2011

 

DNA-Performance-Installation-Soundart

 

Flintinge, Denmark — 19/06/11 14:17 PM

 

 

 

 

 

Live Streamings from Dolmens unfolds as a quiet yet potent act of temporal entanglement. Beneath the ancient stones of Flintinge—dolmens whose origins drift somewhere between archaeology and speculation—the artist instigates a dialogue between the molecular traces of human evolution and the enduring architectures of prehistory.

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Fragments of the human genome, translated into sound, drift through the heavy air beneath the capstones, inhabiting the same acoustic cavities that may once have sheltered the dead. The sonification of DNA collapses boundaries between symbol and matter: what is usually confined to the microscopic becomes vibrational, inhabiting the body of the listener, the body of the earth, and the massive stone thresholds of the dolmens themselves.

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Rather than presenting the dolmens as inert relics, the work reactivates them as transmitters—live, vibrating sites that absorb and refract an ephemeral sonic flow. The installation escapes traditional notions of the archive; it does not merely preserve, but reanimates. Memory here is neither linear nor fixed; it unfolds across shifting materialities, weaving genomic remnants and megalithic architectures into a shared, unstable temporality.

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The choice of live streaming—the insistence on the present tense—infuses the work with an immediacy that resists the stasis often associated with historical monuments. Each broadcast is a fleeting, irreversible encounter, underscoring the precariousness of both biological and cultural continuity. The genome itself, an archive of survival and mutation, is no longer silent but rendered audible, insisting on its presence through sonic textures that evade easy recognition.

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The performance-installation constructs a landscape where informational residues become aesthetic material. Sound is not employed here as a representation of life, but as a direct extension of it—a mutable field where code, stone, air, and consciousness converge. It suggests a media archaeology that does not privilege technological linearity but embraces dispersed, contingent histories—histories that oscillate between the organic and the constructed, between deep time and the volatile present.

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In this terrain, the dolmens cease to be merely objects of contemplation; they become agents within a living system of transmission, modulating the genome’s silent speech into vibrations felt as much as heard. The body of the listener, the ancient stones, and the coded remnants of human life form a single, extended organism: an ephemeral, networked being that pulses across space and time.

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Ultimately, Live Streamings from Dolmens proposes an ecology of existence where the molecular, the monumental, and the ephemeral are co-constitutive. It gestures toward a reconfiguration of how we understand archives, rituals, and communications—favoring a model not of permanence, but of transmission, resonance, and becoming.

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DNA-performance-installation- soundart

(LIVE) 19/06/11 14:17 PM

Place: Flintinge, Denmark

Dolmen 2: 54° 44´23.99″ N 11° 47´23.36″ E

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies

 

 

Marcello Mercado

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, 2007

 

Bio-Performance / Bio-Installation, 2007

 

 

In Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, Marcello Mercado crafts a meditation on mortality, memory, and the biological archive, unfolding across two interconnected actions in Kassel and Brühl in 2007. Initiated by the extraction of DNA from red poppies gathered from Sanja Iveković’s Poppy Field at Documenta Kassel, and culminating in its dissolution into the aquatic habitat of Biomphalaria glabrata worms, the project weaves together ephemeral transmission, organic processes, and technological mediation.

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At its core, the work proposes a volatile circuit of memory: by transmitting the worms’ own genomic sequences back to them via walkie-talkies, Mercado reenacts an ancient gesture—the whispered reminder of mortality to a triumphant general—reinscribed into the molecular language of life. Rather than offering a static image of death, the piece stages a living, recursive inscription, where information becomes both a medium and a memento.

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The project aligns with ideas of media deep time, where archives are not merely human inventions but are entangled with biological and environmental substrata. Rather than preserving information, Memento Mori Genómico lets it mutate and circulate, embodying a processual temporality that challenges linear notions of memory and death. The unstable transmission through radio frequencies mirrors the instability inherent in biological memory itself, where error, mutation, and dissolution are constitutive forces.

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Drawing implicitly from contemporary curatorial thinking that sees archives as dynamic, entropic systems—never fixed, always partial—the performance dissolves the separation between biological material, technological mediation, and cultural residue. It suggests, as certain strands of contemporary theory have proposed, that every act of storing, transferring, and sharing information is also an act of transformation and loss.

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In this fluid landscape, biological entities are no longer passive subjects of observation but active carriers of information, echoing broader shifts in contemporary bio-art towards performative, unstable, and relational practices. Mercado’s choice to use the fragile and modest technology of walkie-talkies further displaces the narrative of technological mastery, foregrounding instead a poetics of vulnerability and transmission error.

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Between Kassel’s global stage and the quieter, hidden life of Brühl, Memento Mori Genómico moves between monumental cultural time and the microscopic temporality of organic life. It inhabits a space where memory is not monumentalized but continuously renegotiated—where archives are not preservations of presence, but processes of inevitable metamorphosis.

In the end, Mercado’s work suggests that mortality, memory, and information share a deeper kinship: all are fleeting, porous, and materially bound. All are, inevitably, transmitted with noise.

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Marcello Mercado
Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information
through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, 2007

Bio-Performance – Bio-Installation,
04′ 00″
stereo 4:3
colour

 

 

 

 

Transitory Artefacts: : A Journey through Time and Media

 

 

 

 

 

Marcello Mercado

Transitory Artefacts: : A Journey through Time and Media

2000 -2025

 

 

 

Dead Code Anatomies

 

 

The Economy of Residues: Temporal Assemblages of Capital and Body

 

 

Gödel Suite, 2009

 

 

Marcello Mercado: Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

 

 

Marcello Mercado: Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements, 2005

 

 

DELETE

 

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

 

transferring, storing, sharing and hybriding: The perfect humus

 

 

Trace, Burn, Archive, 2005 – 2008

 

 

Index – Generator, Performance, 2004

 

 

 

Listening the chromosome 17, 1-channel Video Installation, 2023

 

 

Human Genome re-Activation – Low Lives 3 International Festival of Live Networked Performances, 2011

 

 

To whom belongs the Time?

 

 

 

How to explain to a dead mole the difference between…? Performance, 2001

 

 

Azimuth 77, Performance, 2006

 

 

Confinment, Artist´s book, 82 pages, 2020

 

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies

 

 

The algorithm, 2024, Process art – New media art – AI

 

 

How leopards caught leopards

 

 

Burning Garden – 2024

 

 

Curves, compost, forecasts and closures, Performance, 2020

 

 

 

 

Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

 

Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

 

In 2006, a performative apparatus was activated within a hotel room in Geneva—an environment operating simultaneously as a spatial container and a neutralized architecture of regulation. The performance constructed a field of epistemic operations based on the formal structure of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (1931), which remain fundamental to mathematical logic and the philosophy of formal systems.

 

Two compost containers functioned as epistemological devices. Each was assigned one of Gödel’s theorems, not to symbolize them, but to act as operational surfaces through which non-decidability and internal inconsistency could be performed materially. Rather than creating narrative or symbolic readings, the setup deployed the composts as experimental variables—unstable matter undergoing entropic processes of decomposition and transformation.

 

 

 

From the curatorial perspective of performance studies—as developed by RoseLee Goldberg and later rearticulated in André Lepecki’s analysis of movement, immobility, and time—the piece displaced the body as the primary site of performance and instead foregrounded abstract systems, feedback loops, and logical structures as the protagonists of the performative event.

 

 

 

The First Incompleteness Theorem, applied to one container, asserts that any consistent formal system capable of expressing arithmetic will contain true statements that are unprovable within the system. The compost associated with this theorem functioned as a generative system outside of full codification: a dynamic substrate whose processes could be observed, perturbed, but never entirely mapped or resolved.

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The Second Incompleteness Theorem, linked to the second container, states that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. This recursive impossibility was spatialized in the performance through a set of actions that denied the possibility of internal closure: the use of a laser (a high-frequency, deterministic tool) applied to an unpredictable surface; the attempt to communicate with a non-human medium via a walkie-talkie in an invented, non-indexical language; and the eventual covering of the entire operation with a sterile green surgical drape, interrupting visibility and suspending verification.

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This final gesture—the occlusion—directly responds to what Adrian Heathfield has termed “the aesthetics of disappearance” in performance: the refusal of full visibility, the staging of ungraspable phenomena, and the challenge to archival logic. However, rather than romanticizing ephemerality, the work maintained a rational structure: each action was part of a logical sequence of procedural constraints. The invented language was not expressive but formal, a system without reference but complete in its syntax—testing the boundaries of communication theory and transmission logic.

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Catherine Wood’s writings on performance in institutional contexts resonate here: by activating performance as a system rather than spectacle, and by replacing the performer’s body with materials governed by formal limits, the work interrogated not only the boundaries of the artwork but also the systems through which knowledge is generated, represented, and contained.

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The presence of technological elements—walkie-talkie, laser, surgical drape—was not incidental. These were selected and deployed as devices of precision, transmission, and sterilization. They acted as tools of systematization inserted into an environment that refused stabilization. Chantal Pontbriand’s framing of performance as “research in real time” becomes particularly relevant here: the performance did not seek to represent undecidability—it tested it under tightly controlled yet unresolvable conditions.

Rather than proposing allegory or metaphor, the performance operated as a material experiment with formal limits. It proposed a non-human-centric, system-based structure that echoed the foundational limits of rational knowledge as defined by mathematical logic. The choice of Geneva—epicenter of international standardization, diplomacy, and techno-scientific governance—further reinforced the work’s relationship to epistemic control and its necessary breakdowns.

In this sense, the performance may be read not as an artwork but as a temporary epistemological lab: a controlled failure of system closure.

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Musica Eterna: FM Module. All Season 2 in one episode

 

 

 

We break in the recap episode of the FM Module by FM Einheit: season 2, with the Big Bang, then explore the Touch, gaze into the Glow, balance Freedom and the Future. Forty selected tracks are woven together into one superintense mixtape.

 

 

Participants:

FM Einheit,

Andreas Ammer,
David Link (Poetry Machine),
Heiner Muller,
Meret Becker,
Rica Blunck,
Петер Вайбель,
Martin Wuttke,
Volker Kamp,
Saskia von Klitzing,
Anita Lane,
Marcello Mercado,
Jennifer Minetti,
Phil Minton,
Otto Rössler,
Sophie Royce,
Günter Rüger,
Gloria Swenson,
Andrew Unruh,
Ulrike Haage,
Alexander Hacke,
Marianne Hoppe,
Werner Schwab,
Henning Schmidgen,
The Anarchivists

 

 

 

Track list

01. The Paradox of the Big Bang_Reducing Fear by accelerating Danger № 1 (Text: Otto Rössler) from a lecture at transmediale 2018
02. Summertime Sadness (Text: Poetry Machine. Music: FM Einheit)
03. The Paradox of the Big Bang_Reducing Fear by accelerating Danger №2 (Text: Otto Rössler)
04. Requiem for Laika (Text: Andreas Ammer. Music: Ulrike Haage)
06. The dialects of touch №1 (Text & voice: Henning Schmidgen. Music: FM Einheit)
07. Sweet Dreams (Text: Poetry Machine. Music: FM Einheit)
08. The dialects of touch_tactile modernity (Text & voice: Henning Schmidgen. Music: FM Einheit)
09. Zwei Bücherzerreissmaschinen und mehrere kleine mechanische Objekte (FM Einheit, Andrew Unruh & the Anarchivists)
10. touchable_untouchable (Text & voice: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
11. Poverty & Proximity (Text: Siegfried Zielinski. Music & voice: FM Einheit)
13. Im Paradies (Text: Andreas Ammer. Music: FM Einheit) from the Radio Drama lost & found: das Paradies
14. Cooking — Composing (Text & voice: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
15. Dionysos, Bacchus und der Wein der Antike (Text: Reinhard Stupperich. Voice: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit) from: Dionysos, Bacchus und der Wein der Antike
16. Ajax z.B. (Text: Heiner Mülller. Voices: Sophie Rois, Martin Wuttke. Music: Alexander Hacke, FM Einheit)
17. Beseitigung der Zerstörung (Marcello Mercado)
18. Wine Philosophy (Text: Siegfried Zielinski. Voices: FM Einheit, Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
19. Digesting Sashimi & Sake (Achim Mohné)
20. ABFALL, BERGLAND, CÄSAR (Text: Werner Schwab )
21. freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose (Text: Kerstin Specht)
22. Inhale Exhale (Text: Poetry machine. Music & voice: FM Einheit)
23. Gedankenfreiheit (Text: Friedrich Schiller. Music: FM Einheit)
24. On the State of Things and Their Potential Movement into the Future (Text: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
25. Freedom — from from what / what for? (Text: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
26. On the State of Things and Their Potential Movement into the Future – 9-11 (Text: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
27.Flusser Haut Fragmente (Text: Villem Flusser. Music: Brötzmann, Einheit)
28. Empedocles 1 — The porous skin as a boundary and as a connection (Text: Empedocles, Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
29. skin of hard spirit (Text: Poetry machine. Music: FM Einheit)
30. Empedocles 2 — See: The inner fire and the waste (Text: Empedocles, Siegfried Zielinski. Voice: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
31. FM (Text: Poetry machine, Voice: Rica Blunck & FM Einheit. Music: FM Einheit)
32. The Skin Inside Your Head (Text & voice: Henning Schmidgen. Music: FM Einheit)
33. Under my skin (Text: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
34. River Johnny (Text: Poetry machine. Voice & music: FM Einheit)
35. In the state of vibration there can be no rest. A Theory of Glow — from more than 200 years ago (Text & voice: Siegfried Zielinski. Music: FM Einheit)
36. Realität der Macht_Macht der Realität im 21.Jahrhundert (Text: Peter Weibel. Music: FM Einheit )
37. Stars and a surface (Text: Poetry Machine. Music: FM Einheit)
38. You Scale (Text: Poetry Machine. Music: FM Einheit)
39. in the case of emergency (Text: Andreas Ammer. Music: FM Einheit. Voices: Rica Blunck, safety ballet) from the Radio Drama crashing aeroplanes
40. Fadensonnen (Text & voice: Paul Celan. Music: FM Einheit)

 

 

 

 

OTIS + Radio KXLU 88.9 Los Angeles – Reflection on Experimental Radio- Fall 2014

10.02.2014

 

 

OTIS + Radio KXLU 88.9 Los Angeles – Reflection on Experimental Radio- Fall 2014

 

 

 

 

 

Orson Welles War of the Worlds

 

John Duncan, Paul McCarthy Close Radio

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/evidence_movement/close_radio.html

 

Steven Matheson Apple Grown in a Wind Tunnel

 

Marcello Mercado Broadcasting Bio-information

 

Stelarc Ear on Arm

 

John Cage Imaginary Landscape No. 4

John Cage Water Walk

 

UVB-76  (Pdf)

 

SETI Wow! Signal

 

Bad at Sports

 

More on numbers stations

 

 

 

 

 

 

FILE FESTIVAL 2006

14.08.2006 – 03.09.2006

 

 

FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE LINGUAGEM ELETRÔNICA

ELETRONIC LANGUAGE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

 

 

Catalogue Festival (pdf)

 

 

Continuing our proposition of disseminating high-level, cutting-edge culture to a wide public, SESI Art Gallery promotes, starting from August 14, 2006, a new edi- tion of FILE International Festival of Electronic Language – http://www.file.org.br. In its seventh edition, FILE may be considered one of the main international events of electronic art in the world, and certainly the major show of its sort in Brazil. FILE 2006 accomplishes its exposi- tory version with a great diversity of interactive works which represent the latest forms of aesthetic expression in contemporary digital culture. The festival brings seve- ral modalities of digital art, as web-film, web-art, net-art, virtual reality, artificial life and intelligence, robotics, per- formances, interactive installations.

 

SESI is highly concerned with motivating the national production of digital culture, and in providing spaces for the presentation of the new technological art forms, by Brazilian and international artists.

 

The realization of FILE 2006 is a further example of cul- tural actions promoted by the institutions maintained and managed by the industry entities of the state of São Paulo. With initiatives around the theme of education and sociocultural development, we try to prioritize the exerci- se of citizenship and to make it effective in our Country. At this moment, we believe that sponsoring and accom- plishing projects that comprehend the digital art universe is to be in tune with contemporaneity.

 

Paulo Skaf

Chairman, Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo – FIESP, Roberto Simonsen Institute, SESI (SP) and SENAI (SP)

 

 

 

Galeria de Arte do SESI

São Paulo • Brasil

 

 

Sound Transit – Broadcast on 23rd April 2006 (FBi, Sydney)

23.04.2006

 

 

 

Sound Transit – Broadcast on 23rd April 2006 (FBi, Sydney)

 

This week on SNATM, join us on a tramp through the creative commons of phonography as we traverse the diverse sounds of six continents on an ever-changing aural exhibition of free recordings contributed to the wonderful «sound transit» website. Compiled by Nick Mariette using original field recordings downloaded from SoundTransit, which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

 

Field recordings used were by: Derek Holzer, Aaron Ximm, John Grzinich, Maxim Shentelev, Planktone (aka Ward Weis), Jarra Schirris, Anna Friz, Marcello Mercado, Cedric Peyronnet, Rob Curgenven, Dallas Simpson, James Dunn, Takasaki Ryosuke, Keith de Mendonca, John Hopkins, Nick Mariette, Sean ONeill, Justin Hardison, Alessandro Bosetti, Toby Sinkinson.telev, Planktone (aka Ward Weis), Jarra Schirris, Anna Friz, Marcello Mercado, Cedric Peyronnet, Rob Curgenven, Dallas Simpson, James Dunn, Takasaki Ryosuke, Keith de Mendonca, John Hopkins, Nick Mariette, Sean ONeill, Justin Hardison, Alessandro Bosetti, Toby Sinkinson.

 

 

Part1 – human
Part2 – industrial
Part3 – nature

 

 

 

 

 

About The Physics Room

The Physics Room is a contemporary art space dedicated to developing and promoting contemporary art and critical discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Based in central Ōtautahi Christchurch since 1996, we assist art practitioners with resources and opportunities to enable professional and creative development, and work to support the acknowledgement and understanding of contemporary art among New Zealanders. Our goal is to actively seek links between the arts and other areas of cultural production and to involve art as a contributing voice in wider intellectual, social and political debate.

 

 

 

 

 

Apeiron Zool – Goethe Institut – Córdoba, Argentina

22.10.2001

 

das Kapital.01
(version 1997)

 

Live Performance

https://archive.org/details/DasKapital1

 

 

Apeiron Zool – Goethe Institut – Córdoba, Argentina

 

 

La Voz del interior 22.10.2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

electronic music, abstract, experimental, noise, extreme noises, algorithmic, electro, drone, microsound, soundart, phonography, loop, breakbeat, clicks/cuts, game, industrial, electroacoustic, soundtrack