Patricia Cadavid H. is an immigrant, artist, and researcher born in Colombia. In her work, she looks at the relationships and effects of coloniality in new media from the migratory experience and decolonial & anticolonial thinking. Her recent research is focused on the vindication of the memory contained in the ancestral interfaces of the Andes from Abya Yala, taken away by colonization and their connections with art and science, reusing them in new artistic processes related to video, sound interfaces, tangible live coding, and multimedia performance.
Patricia is pursuing a doctoral degree in the College of Arts, Technology, and Environment at the University of the West of England – UWE Bristol. She holds a MA from Interface Culture (Kunstuniversität Linz). Her work has been exhibited in festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), ADAF (Greece), MATE (Portugal), the NIME conference, and several spaces in the United States, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Colombia.
Spiral
Spiral is a circular listening performance–ritual that merges ancestral Andean technologies with contemporary electronic systems to explore nonlinear temporalities and embodied forms of body–machine interaction. The work unfolds through three custom-built sonic interfaces: Electronic_Khipu_, Kanchay_Yupana//, and Kimsa, designed as hybrid MIDI controllers integrating capacitive sensors, microcontrollers, and real-time processing.
Inspired by the spiral motif of the Quimbaya–Kumba peoples and the Aymara conception of time—walking toward the future while looking at the past—the performance activates memory through gesture, rhythm, and modulated field recordings.
Each instrument translates bodily actions into sonic and visual parameters through synthesis, filtering, and dynamic routing, creating an immersive environment that weaves computational techniques with ancestral logics of recording and calculation. Visually, Spiral uses a cyanotype-inspired aesthetic with deep blue imagery where rivers, earth, palo santo smoke, and wind interlace with linear traces of instruments in motion. The cycle culminates in the rainy Andean mountains, symbolically returning to the land.
