Emiliano Pennisi: "Envion is an open ecosystem where sound, code, and networked memory coexist. It gathers audio fragments from online archives such as Internet Archive, treating them as living matter residues of a collective digital environment that is constantly transforming.
At first, my goal was purely practical: to write queries, small textual instructions that allow code to search a database and return specific types of sounds. But this process turned out to be quite different on Internet Archive compared to, for example, Freesound.
Freesound is entirely dedicated to sound. Each file is carefully classified with tags, categories, and durations, so when you search for “metal impact,” you get a series of well-documented metallic hits recorded by users who actually work with sound.
Internet Archive, on the other hand, is a planetary archive of everything: sermons, radio programs, home tapes, music, lectures, and random recordings.
Its descriptions are textual and often inconsistent, which means that queries tend to produce chaotic, incorrect, and unpredictable results.
A term like 'click' might return a sermon or an interview simply because the word appears in the metadata. At first, I tried to clean these queries to make them more selective, but over time, I realized that this imprecision was actually valuable.
It was as if the database itself was responding in its own language, revealing its internal logic, its cultural and semantic layers. That’s when the technical mechanism became a poetic one: sampling without knowing.
Letting the network reply in its own way, with all its errors, noise, and contradictions. From that point on, I began to see databases not as storage systems but as temporal organisms, full of memories and residues that keep circulating. Each sound is a small imprint of digital life, a fragment of what could be called planetary computation, the network as a living body that records and regenerates itself."
see https://opaltapes.bandcamp.com/album/brain-recordings