Rhythm’s Thief is an artistic intervention that works the urban geomorphology as media for seismic signs navigation, emitted from an abandoned site in the east zone of São Paulo and received at SESC Belenzinho.

The seismic standard results of the passage of seismic waves through a determined point on the land surface. The point from where the initial vibrations are emitted is called focus. The point in the surface above of the focus is called opicenter.

In this intervention, the seismic waves are provoked by the impact generated by two pile drivers, fixing large metallic profiles, located at a distance of 100m one from the other. The pile drivers generate a rhythmic series of signs to be picked-up by seismographs to long of the way, reproducing the information of different time intervals, through the alternation of the moments in which each of the profiles is reached by the pile driver.

The capitation of these signs in a set up located in the reception place allows its analysis by a computational program, with the objective of extracting digital complex standards to be presented in real time. Concomitantly it will be teletransmitted by a broadcasting TV team, with the cameras and microphones located in strategic points, to give another visibility to the complex phenomena involved in the process: impact of the hammer in the profile, as the mechanical system and the coding of these standards in digital system, a way to turn visible something invisible for our scale of perception.

THE GROUND URBAN AS INSTRUMENT

The milieu of seismic propagation is the urban ground, which also is media of the seismic signs, whose standard and rhythm are digitally codified. What is cultural noise for seismology, for we is language raw material, in a free transit between code and nature. The city ground is semantically rich because the frequent presence of diverse events, in its surface (carriages, trains, subways, etc.) and in the subsoil (tubing, foundations, subway foundations, hollowing, etc.), especially in contrast to the natural land composition (forests, deserts, etc).

The project artistic proposal involves the idea of intervention in the actual urban physicality, reaching the scale of the urbis implantation in the ground, first manifestation of urban culture - "to lie down roots in a place", a geophysical space.

Signs and rhythms are primitive manifestations of semiotic density, therefore cultural and aesthetic. Seismic signs are telluric, raw, natural, spontaneous, but pregnant of cultural meaning, once they result of instrumentation, the use of human construction tools, on the ground and subsoil.

Therefore, Rhythm’s Thief uses the ground as instrument - percussion membrane, which enters in orchestration, stealing other signs that propagate in the subsoil of the east zone of São Paulo.

José Wagner Garcia