The Great Transition is chronologically the second novel in Aramo Olaya’s futuristic post-apocalyptic trilogy Anarchy or Barbarism. In the novel, technology and memory subsist only as recycled scrap from the cities that people have abandoned for small villages. Politico-religious revolutions will wipe out the last small neo-capitalist kingdoms such as Tojé – erected in regional power through slavery, mining, and the recycling of Artificial Intelligences – in favour of a post-war era agreed between humans and AIs in which humans assume their responsibility towards the planet and the non-human community.

Very present in The Great Transition is the somatic sensoriality and sensitivity to the non-human around us, understood through Aramo’s reflection on his long experience in Contact Improvisation (CI) which currently forms the bulk of his research at the University of California UC-Davis and which informs the performative content Aramo has created and included in the multimedia website dedicated to his fictional trilogy.

During the artist residency Xiu will develop the acousmatic part of The Great Transition. Researching and reflecting from his own experience as a musician on Aramo’s ideas, Xiu will sonify parts of the novel to contribute to Aramo’s performative content for his website and for the creation of an installation of the novel with a double artistic-experimental intention that will look for meeting points between somatic and acousmatic to illuminate the utopian potential of possible acousmatic-somatic practices.