OMMANDALA is an installation based on an interactive generator of surreal mandalas, controlled by voice and/or sound.
The mandala is a spiritual and ritual symbol in the Hindu religions. It represents the universe and is built according to a well-defined set of rules, just like generative art.
Mandalas were originally used to focus the attention of practitioners and adepts, as auxiliary tools for orientation, and to establish a sacred space, helping to induce trance.
In recent years the Western world has appropriated the term to designate diagrams, maps or geometric patterns representing the cosmos – or a microcosm, or the universe – metaphysically or symbolically. The interactive creation of mandalas, at once organic and geometric, can thus become not only an aesthetic experience but a personal state of awareness, entertainment or meditation, joyful or hypnotic.
OMMANDALA is a representation of our domestic "cosmos". As an eminently playful installation, it also stimulates our "genetic" propensity to produce meaning from symbols. Using visual representations of objects as varied as a chair, a sardine or a pair of women's shoes, the meanings of these small cosmoi are often absurd – but even so they confront us with the proliferation of objects, food and props in our lives, most of which go practically unnoticed and whose function and role can and should be questioned.
It is in those moments that we laugh, shout or simply talk... and OMMANDALA regenerates according to our sounds and offers us a new collection of stimuli.
To that end, OMMANDALA has two components: a physical one, with a mandala of real objects arranged around a suspended microphone stand, and a digital one, the generative art application developed for the purpose in Processing 3.1, whose output is projected.
Ommandala 2019
Surreal mandalas of hyper-connected mundane life. Real-time screen capture using the soundtrack as a generator (some latency can be observed).
