In the dense forest that extends along the coast of Brazil, recurrent high-pitch chirps are audible from the forest floor to the canopy, every evening. They last only a fraction of a second and come at you from different distances and directions, forming an asynchronous, immersive choir. Amid a complex acoustic environment, these calls note presence, situatedness, and ecological identity. Hidden among the vegetation, these sounds place attention on the plant life that engulfs them. Jumping from one place to the another, they signal the differing time scales our perception require to recognize distinct more-than-human voices.

In Singing Lines, these calls reach beyond the sense of hearing into the threshold of vision: fine LED strips surge into light with each cricket call. Lasting between 19 to 21 milliseconds, the minimum required for the human eye to perceive an image, their brightness quickly shifts in our field of vision. Our eyes are constantly interpellated beckoning the movement of our bodies, as each lightning strike redirects our gaze across the entire space in search for the cricket’s call. As we move across, their calls signal a rapid transition between our visual, audible and haptic senses, our perception heightened by the experience of becoming present to the light and sound that surrounds us.