Sensing Presence is a participatory installation that reimagines telepresence through non-visual means, inspired by research from the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (the TEAM) about Digital Twins technologies (digital twins) in the port of Valencia.
Digital twins are digital replicas of an object that use information from sensors, Artificial Intelligence and other technologies to determine the behavior of the object in the real world, improving decision making and operational efficiency. The artistic proposal Colette Aliman and Dan Xu imagines what a digital twins would be like if it were not created for efficiency purposes, supervision or benefit. in the piece, Real-time sensor data is intertwined with sound recordings collected by the artists from hydrophones, geophones and microphones placed in the port of Valencia. These fragments are merged with a custom artificial intelligence model, trained with historical records, which produces speculative futures of the environmental states of the port.
The exhibition invites visitors to slow down, feel, listen and feel the presence of the port through underwater acoustics, surface vibrations and wind. The installation frames the port not as a place optimized for commerce, but as an ecological and atmospheric body, a post-utilitarian telepresence experiment that is environmental, hybrid and open to uncertainty.
