Huéspedes

Huéspedes is an interactive audiovisual installation developed as Final Master Project for MICME at LABA Valencia, presented at the MICME Festival in June 2026. Through sculptural light, laser projection mapping, sound, and audience tracking, the work makes visible the invisible processes by which rumination becomes a form of internal violence, transforming psychological distress into tangible biological stress.

The LED tubes form a suspended waveform around a circular projection base, a fragile genetic map of the self whose brightness shifts with the audio, dimming into stressful tones during peaks of rumination and recovering in calm. On the platform below, a cellular structure is projected. As the viewer approaches they become an unwelcome guest: organisms leap from the centre, follow the body, and erode what they touch, yet the cell slowly rebuilds itself. The piece draws on psychoneuroimmunology and perseverative cognition: thought as something that does not stay in the mind, but inhabits and attacks the body from within.

The system runs in TouchDesigner as a single master environment: forty LED tubes driven over ArtNet/DMX, laser mapping synchronized with the circular projection, Ableton Live for the soundscape via TDAbleton, and an Orbbec depth sensor for audience tracking. Presence is not decoration. Proximity triggers the cellular organisms and modulates the field.

Presented at the MICME Festival, Huéspedes was built through iterative prototyping (steel-cable tube suspension, projector and laser housing on the central beam, a floating Fibracolor circular base) and calibrated under tight pre-festival timing.