HUMAN INSTRUMENT

A 45-minute immersive A/V dome performance, HUMAN INSTRUMENT explores the interplay between voice, vibration, and liquid matter, rendering sound as a living, visual presence. Within this sensory environment, voice becomes more than an auditory experience—it manifests as a tangible force, shaping the space and dissolving the boundaries between performer, audience, and medium.

Developed at the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT), the project integrates macro photography, live performance, and real-time audiovisual processing through an interactive system designed by Isabella Salas and Patrick Trudeau. Using 4K imaging and cymatics, sonic frequencies are translated into organic, fluid geometries, which unfold across the dome in real-time, creating an evolving landscape of resonance and form.

At the heart of the visual rig, a macro lens magnifies a petri dish of liquid, where each singer’s voice sculpts intricate, ephemeral formations—a fleeting yet intimate visualization of the human instrument in action.

The performance bridges the physical and the ancestral, as Rafelle Mackay’s original sound and music composition braids with the voices of Anishinaabe and Ojibwe Elders, whose water prayer envelops the space.
This invocation—both sonic and spiritual—resonates beyond the performance, echoing through the elemental, the historical, and the deeply interconnected.

Exhibitions & Screenings

2019 _ Immersed Festival [UK]

Société des Arts Technologiques [CA] retake

2018_ Société des Arts Technologiques [CA]

A collaboration between Isabella Salas and 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰, Indigenous Futurologies critically examines the intersection of ancestral knowledge and machine intelligence, revealing the tensions between algorithmic bias and cultural memory.

Using ethically sourced datasets of Mesoamerican masks, the work confronts the erasure embedded in AI systems, questioning: How do we envision the future when Indigenous identities are reduced to statistical probabilities? In a technological landscape that continues to privilege Western ontologies, the project challenges the decolonization of AI, calling for new ways of encoding history, language, and heritage into digital systems.

Manifesting in both ephemeral and material forms, Indigenous Futurologies exists as a 40-second video loop and a six-print collection, each image sublimated onto aluminum (11” x 11”)—a gesture that merges digital archives with physical permanence, resisting the disposability of data-driven aesthetics.

Exhibitions

2023_ Sporobole [CA]

2020_ COMPOSITE MTL [CA]

Fundamental Frequencies is a biometric multimedia installation and performance that explores the intimate relationship between sound, perception, and cognition, translating the act of listening into a visual language. By mapping brain activity in real time, the work offers a rare glimpse into the unseen landscapes of auditory experience, transforming neurological responses into evolving imagery.

Directed and conceptualized by Isabella Salas, the project examines how electronic and acoustic soundscapes engage the brain differently, using neurological datasets to visualize auditory perception. These shifting patterns are accompanied by Claire Kenway’s immersive compositions, where sound itself is shaped by scientific data, constructing sonic environments that reflect the audience’s cognitive engagement.

By bringing together biometric technology, real-time data processing, and sonic experimentation, Fundamental Frequencies challenges our understanding of how we experience and internalize sound—both individually and collectively.

Prototype Presentations

2020 – MUTEK AI Lab @ MILA, Montreal | Selected for development & Phase II presentation

2020 – Music Motion Hacklab Meet-up @ Ausgang Plaza, Montreal

2019 – MUTEK Montréal XX – Prototyping & Co-Creation Panel @ DigiLab

Awards & Recognitions

2020 – One of 13 international projects selected by MUTEK AI Lab

2019 – Le Livart | Research Residency

2019 – Music Motion Hacklab | 2nd Prize – Prototyping & Co-Creation

A multimedia installation by Isabella Salas [MX/CAN] & Nora Golic [ARG/CAN], Interhuman explores communal potential and identity through a fusion of photography, machine learning, and algorithmic recognition.

Born during the COVID-19 lockdown, the project draws on Martin Buber’s concept of “the interhuman”—a space of dialogue, inclusion, and shared meaning. Original multicultural portraits by Nora Golic are analyzed and reshaped by Isabella Salas’ machine learning process, where unseen interpolations generate entirely new human forms.

Through dynamic transitions, textures, and latent walks, Interhuman blurs the boundaries between the individual and the collective, offering a constantly evolving reflection on diversity and connection.

Presented at: Uno, Nessuno, Centomila, Electric Artifacts, London [UK], 2021

Entomorphosis is a visual study of transformation and nature’s taxonomies, inspired by the intricate structures of insects and their sonic imprints.

Developed in response to Leon Louder’s album, Entomophonie—commissioned by the Montreal Insectarium and MUTEK—this work explores the intersection of biological archives and generative image synthesis. Using 763 original images from the Insectarium’s collection, the project reconstructs, distorts, and reimagines entomological specimens beyond scientific documentation, shifting archival practices from static preservation to algorithmic reinterpretation.

Through this process, textures, patterns, and organic symmetries emerge, reflecting the structures of insect morphology while engaging with the digital transformation of biological memory. The work examines how non-human life is encoded, categorized, and interpreted within technological and artistic frameworks, rethinking the ways in which overlooked species are represented in data-driven and creative systems.

Graced by the Montreal Insectarium | Espace pour la vie and MUTEK licensing of their images, Entomorphosis moves between scientific documentation and speculative reconstruction, questioning the boundaries between natural history and synthetic perception.

Publication

Featured in Seisma Magazine (UK) – Entomology Edition

30th CENTURY POEMS is a micro-mapping video installation that interpolates epic poetry in Mayan and Persian alphabets, revealing the blind spots of computer vision and logic when confronted with graphic languages beyond Western and postcolonial systems.

In a world where algorithms still fail to recognize entire linguistic legacies, this project started seeding in 2020 unseen datasets into machine learning—challenging a technological landscape that, remained structurally biased.

As new tools emerge, so does an insidious silent colonization, embedded within search engines and AI-driven archives. These machines, shaped by exclusionary logic, continue to erase identities, histories, and art—dismissing them into the void of big data’s forgetting machine.

The Glass Gallery album rethinks architecture through music, video mapping, and visual abstraction, transforming performance into a spatial dialogue.

Through a distinct visual language, Isabella Salas integrates low-definition space photography and live feeds from the International Space Station, embracing grain, noise, and the spectral imprints of early celestial imaging. These textures disrupt the hyper-polished aesthetic of contemporary digital visuals, instead echoing the atmospheric fragility of Schofield’s soundscapes. Light and shadow interact in real time, dissolving the boundary between sound, image, and architecture.

2021_ Centre Phi (Antenna)

Rooted in the interconnectivity of ecosystems, Sympoietic Reveries unfolds as a dynamic visual canvas that interrogates the relationships between sustainability, collaboration, and coexistence in an era of ecological precarity.
The installation draws from sympoiesis, a concept articulated by Donna Haraway, which describes the mutual creation of new forms through interdependent processes. Here, this notion extends beyond the biological to explore how artistic, technological, and conceptual entanglements give rise to emergent patterns, shared narratives, and collective reimaginings of the world we inhabit.

Through layered visuals and evolving compositions from dataset of the Saint-Lawrence river, in Quebec, Sympoietic Reveries invites audiences to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the living and the artificial, where organic systems and digital interpretations coalesce, dissolve, and regenerate—mirroring the delicate balance between disruption and renewal.

Exhibitions & Screenings

2023 - Voltaje Festival [COL]

TOPO [CA]

Overton(e) Window is a collaboration between Isabella Salas and MIchael Merserau explores the shifting boundaries of political acceptability and public discourse, drawing from the Overton Window—a framework that defines which ideas are considered mainstream or radical at any given time. Structured in three movements, the work reflects on key events of 2020 in the Americas, where moments of solitude, uprising, and uncertainty redefined societal norms.

The piece traces pandemic-induced isolation in Solitude, the eruption of mass protests and collective action in Resonance, and the uncertain futures shaped by climate crises, Indigenous resistance, and political upheavals in Hope. As the Black Lives Matter uprisings, environmental catastrophes, and contested elections reshaped public consciousness, what once seemed impossible became urgent and necessary.

By reframing the Overton Window as both a sonic and political threshold, Overton(e) Window transforms past events into a tension between acceptance and disruption, silence and uprising, memory and projection, questioning the forces that shift societal limits and define the imaginable.

Presented at

2022_ VISIONS DU REEL _ Maison de Culture Claude Leveille [CA]

Small Flower Bits is an audiovisual meditation on oceanic fragility, merging generative imagery and sonic resonance to explore digital memory’s imperfections and ecological urgency.

Developed in 2020, the project embraces vintage GAN aesthetics and a slow-tech approach, using the glitches and distortions of early AI to reflect on ephimerality—both technological and ecological. Trained on a limited dataset of endangered coral reefs, it challenges technological archives, where entire ecosystems risk being reduced to data voids. Rather than reconstructing reality, the work amplifies fragility, its spectral, shifting compositions mirroring the instability of marine life.

The sonic landscape, composed by Henry Thr Miller, translates digital textures into vibrational soundscapes, activating a multisensory dialogue between sound, image, and body.

In its live iteration at REEF Festival 2022 [HON], the piece was projected onto the ocean at night, where light, water, and movement merged. The work became transient—altered by the tide, dissolving into the sea—an ephemeral exchange between digital art and a vanishing ecosystem.

Exhibitions & Screenings

2022 – REEF Festival [HON]

2021 – Maison de la Culture Claude Léveillée [CA]

2020 – MUTEK [CA], Voltaje Festival [COL]

Birds of Paradise series reinterprets Latin American avian biodiversity through a fusion of digital synthesis and organic aesthetics. Constructed from 689 archival images, the work transcends traditional representation, engaging with the complexity of plumage as both biological artifact and digital material.

Rather than replicating nature, the project reconfigures the essence of flight, texture, and color through a generative process that distills the intricate structures of feathers into evolving compositions. The interplay between machine learning and natural forms allows for a dynamic reframing of biodiversity—not as a static subject, but as an entity in flux.

The series challenges the role of AI in creative practice, negotiating the tension between computation and the intuitive irregularity of organic life. The result is a visual language that oscillates between the familiar and the synthetic, drawing attention to the fragility of species and the instability of digital memory.

Print

Lightboxes – Wood, LED lights, sublimation on velvet (30” x 30”)

Prints – Sublimation on aluminum (11” x 11”)

The Polaris Music Prize, presented by CBC Music, reimagined its 2020 edition as a cinematic event, commissioning Canadian filmmakers to create short films inspired by the ten nominated albums.

CARIBOU – Suddenly, directed by Isabella Salas & Mark Ó Fearghaíl blended performance, video mapping, and GAN-generated imagery into a hybrid visual experience. AI-generated textures reshaped organic and digital elements, mirroring themes of transformation and impermanence. Live projections merged with generative visuals, dissolving the line between physical performance and digital abstraction.

Streaming on CBC Gem and CBCMusic.ca/Polaris, the event concluded with the live announcement of the 2020 Polaris-winning album on October 19, 2020.

Transfiguration: AV Performance by 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰 & Isabella Salas

A live AV performance by 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰[MX/GER] and Isabella Salas [MX/CAN], Transfiguration explores the neural network as an alchemical machine, treating Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as a homunculus—a synthetic entity capable of morphing sound design aesthetics while preserving cadence and structure.

Rooted in 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰’s full-length album Transfiguration, the performance applies AI-driven raw audio synthesis to distill, dissolve, and reconfigure sonic textures.
The GAN acts as a transfigurative agent, distilling one aesthetic into another, allowing AI to function as a conduit for mutation and recontextualization.

Salas extends this process visually, modeling her datasets in a transmedia layer that fractures and reconstructs audiovisual memory, dissolving the boundary between input and reinterpretation.

Exhibitions & Performances

2023 – [De]stabilizing Diffusions, Milieux Institute, Concordia University + MUTEK_Montréal [CA]*

2020 – TransArt Festival, Bolzano [IT]