Zemi

Colin Frank Maria Sappho

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This installation presents Zemi, an interactive carpet that invites audiences to activate an evolving archive of audio-visual materials through movement and touch. Functioning as both instrument and host, the work responds to bodily presence, shaping a shared environment of sound, image, and memory. Carpets are quiet witnesses to human life. They hold the weight of bodies, conversations, grief, celebration, and time itself: everyday objects that absorb traces of living and often pass through generations. Across cultures, carpets appear in folklore as magical surfaces: vehicles of travel, transformation, and passage between worlds. The title Zemi draws from Taíno cosmology, where zemí are ancestral presences embodied in material forms. Here, the carpet is reimagined as a living surface, one that listens, remembers, and responds. Woven patterns inspired by Taíno, Indonesian, and Celtic symbology form pathways into a growing archive of songs, field recordings, voices, and moving images. As participants step, pause, lean, or shift their weight, materials blend and reconfigure, producing an emergent audio visual-soundscape shaped through whole-body interaction. The work encourages slow exploration and supports engagement across generations and abilitites, reflecting a broader interest in the politics of accessible instrument design and the redistribution of musical agency. The archive evolves between installations, often incorporating local contributions. Blending textile materiality, embodied interaction, and creative corpus manipulation, Zemi transforms a domestic object into a site of collective memory, care, and creative agency. The work has been presented internationally in festival, gallery, and research contexts across Asia, Africa, the UK and Europe.

Citation

Colin Frank Maria Sappho. 2026. Zemi. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20782134 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_music_38,
 abstract = {This installation presents Zemi, an interactive carpet that invites audiences to activate an evolving archive of audio-visual materials through movement and touch. Functioning as both instrument and host, the work responds to bodily presence, shaping a shared environment of sound, image, and memory. Carpets are quiet witnesses to human life. They hold the weight of bodies, conversations, grief, celebration, and time itself: everyday objects that absorb traces of living and often pass through generations. Across cultures, carpets appear in folklore as magical surfaces: vehicles of travel, transformation, and passage between worlds. The title Zemi draws from Taíno cosmology, where zemí are ancestral presences embodied in material forms. Here, the carpet is reimagined as a living surface, one that listens, remembers, and responds. Woven patterns inspired by Taíno, Indonesian, and Celtic symbology form pathways into a growing archive of songs, field recordings, voices, and moving images. As participants step, pause, lean, or shift their weight, materials blend and reconfigure, producing an emergent audio visual-soundscape shaped through whole-body interaction. The work encourages slow exploration and supports engagement across generations and abilitites, reflecting a broader interest in the politics of accessible instrument design and the redistribution of musical agency. The archive evolves between installations, often incorporating local contributions. Blending textile materiality, embodied interaction, and creative corpus manipulation, Zemi transforms a domestic object into a site of collective memory, care, and creative agency. The work has been presented internationally in festival, gallery, and research contexts across Asia, Africa, the UK and Europe.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {38},
 author = {Maria Sappho, Colin Frank},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20782134},
 editor = {Lia Mice and Nicole Robson and Tara Pattenden},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Installation},
 numpages = {4},
 pages = {157--160},
 presentation-video = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxJpWOPdG8U},
 title = {Zemi},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_music_38.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}