Elisa Melodia is a product and interactive designer who is based in Rome, and works
between Rome and Milan.
In 2018 she graduated in Design, Management and Cultures (BA) from UAL University in
London. She then completed a master's Degree in Sustainable Design at the Polytechnic
of Milan, which led her to begin personal research on traditional sustainable materials and
techniques that took her to India up until 2020. From 2021, she will continue her studies in
design, focusing on the design of products. She is currently attending the Integrated
Design Masters program at Milan Polytechnic.
Her professional experience started in London in the film industry, as a set designer, a role
that she still takes, working independently in Milan. She has also worked full time for three
design agencies and for sustainable technology companies. From April last year she
moved to Rome, where she works as a 3D museum designer and digital interaction
designer for international clients, film festivals and fairs.
Because of her passion for the performing arts, she develops artistic collaborations with
performers, stylists and musicians to design interactive costumes that explore posthuman
abilities and products that "come to life." In between classes, she became self-taught in
electronics and software. Later, she decided to take extracurricular courses in music
software, such as Maxmsp, and in circuit design for hardware electronics and electronic
textiles. She has performed in Europe with her former collective and has been invited to
Maker Faire and Arduinjo days as a designer/performer and to Alta Roma runways as a
designer. She has led product design workshops at technology and art festivals in Italy,
engaging adults and children in the science of interaction design.
Her previous projects have often involved microphones, sensors, microcontrollers, and
parametric software for creating "special effects" with music generation and filtering,
robotic control, and video control. Her later works focus primarily on sound art and
performance, where technology becomes a medium to achieve new creative outcomes in
movement and sound. Through her creations, she seeks new possibilities for the
entertainment industry and explores the ubiquitous but unexplored creative interaction
between humans and computers.
Her overall research relates to the possible combinations between technologies and the
arts and crafts, as well as the performative arts, in order to create new forms of emotional
expression that go hand in hand with the newly acquired functionalities resulting from the
integration of digital technologies into the contemporary fields of the traditional arts.
Project:
As part of the Foreign Objekt Residency, I would like to explore the animistic perception of
objects through experimental sound and performance. Music originated in caves where
our ancestors drummed on rocks, and the creation of sound is one of the first discovered
forms of human-induced change in our world. With its strong origins and irrational
approach to human emotions, sound provides the impetus for movement, language and
liberation. In the production of sound, the relationship to the object described by the beat is
closely interwoven. But it is not only in music that we find inner liberation. Since the
performer(s) of sound is not only a musician, but any human being, sound can be
associated with various actions in which that human being becomes one with the object of
sound production and changes with it. As is the case with language, for example.
Within the scope of this research, I would like to explore the relationship between
surrounding spaces, liberating actions and evolving languages. From this perspective,
music-making becomes secondary to the exploration of sounds associated with actions.
The sounds of a door opening sadly or a door opening anxiously, the sound of an egg
cracking or the sound of an egg being thrown. The differences between the emotions in
the performance of these sounds lead to the production of creative results, as well as
sound art, performative soundtracks and new language. In actions of rupture, as we see in
the video trailer "Brokage", we have tried to restore the primal not as primitive, but rather
as a pre-logical state, far from adulthood, through the release of pain, longing and
expectations.
Performance is therefore explored as a meaningful form for rhythm and composition, while
materials (their interactions and sounds) become signifiers of the contemporary
environment.
My research proposal revolves around the construction of a foreign body language and
speech that will be shown through a set of videos. The native sounds will be formed
through the elaboration of sounds produced by the breaking of different materials and the
exploration of different acts of breaking. These objects in the contest of breaking represent
current desires for success and destruction, fantasies that become part of us and control
us with everyday movement and language.foreign
From the elaboration of the sounds of breaking and their a perfomatic, or embodied, a new
language that does not resemble our own, as well as a soundtrack for a moving body and
a series of repetitive loops that explore the will explore the ritual of liberation through
catharsis.
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