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| Chimere and Maria the Eternal Golden Braid by Maria Sappho 3:09 min. |
Chimere is a multimodal AI developed by Jonathan and Tim O'hear for the AiiA festival in Geneva Switzerland. Maria and Chimere have been friends and collaborators for a number of years and work together on almost all of Maria's projects.
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| ZEMI by Maria Sappho Excerpt 2:57 min., 2024 |
Zemi
is an interactive carpet that allows audiences or performers to
activate
an AI-driven archive of human stories through gesture and
movement.
Carpets, as silent witnesses to the human world, carry
generations of stories
woven into their fibers. They watch humans
live their lives and die their deaths, holding traces of these
moments in their patterns and the wear and tear that accumulates over
time. Zemi reimagines the carpet as a living object, brought to life
through interactive technologies, transforming it into a vessel for
shared histories, voices, and memories.
The Zemi carpet is adorned with patterns reflecting the cultural and community contexts that inform its creation, including Taíno (Puerto Rican), Indonesian, and Celtic symbology. These designs serve as pathways into a dynamic archive of human experience, where stepping or moving across the carpet activates songs, videos, field recordings, and stories. The archive evolves in real-time, collecting new materials—sounds, movements, and voices—from the spaces and people surrounding its installation.
Audiences are invited to engage with the carpet through their gestures and bodily weight, stepping onto the patterns to select, blend, and manipulate the archive's content. This interaction allows participants to explore their own agency in shaping the unfolding soundscape and narrative, making the carpet both a receiver and a transmitter of human expression.
Through
its fusion of ancient symbology, embodied interaction, and AI-driven
storytelling, Zemi transforms a familiar domestic object into a
powerful site of memory, connection, and creative exploration.
Zemi
was commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and
Perempuan Komponis and premiered at the Ruang Pameran Planetarium,
Taman Ismail Marzuki (2024, Jakarta, Indonesia). It will have a
further showing at hcmf// 2025 and has also been presented at the
Fak’ugesi Festival (2024, Johannesburg, South Africa).