Performances

29 July 2024 @ Kotorart Festival (Kotor, Montenegro)

24 January 2025 @ Festival novog zvuka (Sinj, Croatia)

28 March 2025 @ Music Biennale Zagreb (Zagreb, Croatia)

Nature Amplified is an audio-visual performance project by the NAE Ensemble, combining performing arts, multichannel electronics, and sound and video installation. Inspired by natural processes, the current ecological state, and the pioneering work of American composer David Dunn, the project explores sonification techniques that translate bioacoustic and ecological data into sound, merging art, science, and ecology. Aesthetically, it examines the boundary between the natural and the artificial: synthetic sounds generated by algorithms, inspired by real natural processes and biological structures, form the foundation of the multimedia performances. These are blended with field recordings from locations across Croatia, creating a complex counterpoint between elements drawn from reinterpretations of the same natural phenomena.

The project is structured in four major sections, each focused on a different natural phenomenon and approached through distinct sonification techniques and musical/visual approaches. In the soil-focused section, Conversations with the Earth, the scanned terrain of specific locations generates electronic sound and visual elements: 3D terrain mapping feeds a "wave-terrain" synthesis technique, where terrain features define sound characteristics such as frequency and amplitude.

The water-focused section, Conversations with the Sea, translates measurements of wave strength and frequency into numerical data controlling delay lines in the electronic music. The wind-focused section is an improvised performance in which the ensemble plays alongside a custom instrument built by multimedia artist Tin Dožić and luthier Maxime Weinmann - a contemporary take on the Aeolian harp, inspired by wind movement and serving as the main drone generator.

The final section, composed by German composer Simon Kanzler, uses animal-movement algorithms to organize the spatial distribution of sound across a four-channel system.

Nature Amplified explores humanity's alienation from nature, questioning our disconnection and lack of awareness of coexistence while speculating on our future relationship with the natural world. Through synthesized sounds drawn from the sonification of natural processes, the project simulates the artificiality of this fragmented connection, while real, collage-style nature sounds highlight the divide. The work presents nature "in boxes" - closed and isolated - mirroring how we perceive and "consume" it.

Yet within this synthetic representation, nature is amplified to evoke an organic presence within the algorithm: a reminder of its persistent vitality despite its abstraction and distortion in human perception. The composition becomes a tension between the artificial and the organic, reflecting both our fractured relationship with nature and its enduring, life-giving strength.

The project "Nature Amplified" and the NAE Collective's 2025 residency were supported through EFFEA (European Festival Fund for Emerging Artists), an initiative of the European Festivals Association (EFA), with the participation of the Kotorart festival (Montenegro), Festival novog zvuka Sinj (Croatia), and Music Biennale Zagreb (Croatia).

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