Lilytronica

In her project Lilytronica, Afroditi Psarra is embroidering synthesizers from conductive textiles and electronics. She contrasts the primitive digital quality of the 8-bit digital audio with the fragile and glitch-prone nature of electronic embroideries, creating a contradiction between the "soft" interfaces of the embroidered instruments and the loud and immersive soundscapes they produce.

"Lilytronica is a project inspired by folk tradition, pop culture and DIY electronics, utilizing hand-made electronic embroidery in the context of experimental sound performance. The work is based on live improvisation through the use of three embroidered synthesizers with LilyPad Arduino micro controllers, sensors and actuators embedded into fabric. The primitive digital quality of the square-wave sounds, and the fragile and glitch-prone nature of the electronic embroideries, reference the DIY character of e-textile experimentation. The intrinsic aspect of this work is the contradiction created between the “soft” interfaces of the embroidered instruments and the loud and immersive soundscape that they produce."

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Photos, videos, sound excerpts and cited texts (c) by the artist