Witness Node

Year and location

2026, Barcelona

Medium

Interactive installation / audiovisual work

Context

Sonar+D / Expo+D, Barcelona, June 2026.

Category: computational ritual.

Role and credits

Concept, design and production by Marta Minguell.

Description

A sculpture that acts as an entity, guiding visitors through a divination ritual. Grounded in the Opele chain and the Ifá / Afa divination systems of Yoruba and EṢe tradition, binary-based systems that share their foundational logic with modern computing, the work treats indigenous knowledge not as a precursor to technology, but as advanced, complete, and structurally continuous with it. Each encounter detected by a camera and Broox computer vision generates a unique seed between 0 and 255 through an algorithm created in TouchDesigner, rendered as a binary pattern that mirrors the 256 Odu of Ifá, and closes with a spoken message for the visitor’s path.

Technical

Arduino Uno, MAX7219, WS2812 LED ring
Webcam, computer
Broox Vision Node, TouchDesigner, Arduino
Serial communication, Python