The work expands from a single responsive body into a large textile installation.
Interactive sculpture · 2014
Multipodiforme Verde
A sound-responsive sculpture that turns ambient noise into wind, making a dense field of green ribbons breathe and move.
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Project typeArtwork · Sculpture · Installation / environment
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Materials & making · Speculative & critical design
FormInteractive sculpture
Developed2014
Input / outputSound / air and movement
SeriesMultipodiformes / Tropical Disturbance
01 · Proposition
Sound becomes wind; wind becomes a visible body
Multipodiforme Verde gives ambient sound a material consequence: air moves through the sculpture and its dense textile surface begins to behave like a living environment.
The work belongs to Multipodiformes, a series of imaginary soft-bodied creatures with organic, flexible shapes and simple environmental interactions. This green specimen is also part of Tropical Disturbance, a body of work where exuberant colour and responsive behaviour animate hybrid forms that sit between vegetation, weather and animal life.
Sensors register the presence of sound and an Arduino-controlled fan generates airflow inside the sculpture. The air disturbs the hanging ribbons, translating an invisible acoustic event into visible, irregular movement. A direct causal chain—sound, wind, motion—is enough to make the static object appear to breathe.
02 · Experience
Listen, blow, move
- 01
Listen
Sensors register sound in the surrounding environment, making the acoustic presence of visitors the work’s input.
- 02
Blow
An Arduino-controlled fan translates that signal into airflow within the sculpture.
- 03
Move
The air animates the hanging ribbons, converting a passing sound into visible, organism-like motion.
03 · Reflection
An atmosphere becomes an organism
The sculpture behaves less like a self-contained object than a responsive textile field in which sound acquires a temporary body.
Its behaviour is mechanically simple but perceptually open. Air does not produce a fixed image; it creates small variations across hundreds of flexible strips, allowing visitors to read the movement as breath, agitation or growth. By joining an environmental signal to a tactile surface, Multipodiforme Verde makes the gallery atmosphere part of the creature’s anatomy.
Ambient sound is converted into airflow and then made visible through ribbon movement.
Soft material, sensors, electronics and a fan create the sculpture’s responsive behaviour.
Credits & archive
Project record
- Concept, design and development
- Ricardo O’Nascimento
- Series and context
- Multipodiformes · Tropical Disturbance
- Exhibition record
- 13th Mostra Internacional Gas Natural Fenosa · A Coruña, Spain · 2014
- Materials
- Ribbon, papier-mâché, electronics, fan and sensors
