Embodied Emotions by Gadi Sassoon

Embodied Emotion by Milan-based composer and transmedia artist Gadi Sassoon is an exhibition of three connected installations, spanning kinetic sculpture, room-scale projection, sound and interactive media, that give physical form to a decade of research into machines, algorithms, embodiment and feeling. Conceived as a single digital happening, the works translate his musical language of rhythm, texture and orchestration into objects, motion and space. Embodied Emotion was first presented at the United Nations in Geneva in July; the exhibition marks Sassoon’s return to art'otel London Hoxton with a solo show, following his collaboration on Mirrored Lightscapes (soundscape) at last year's festival. Kaleidoptera spans the gallery walls: 46 individually addressable, 3D-printed modules arranged in two columns resembling segmented life forms. Before each synthetic creature stands a plinth carrying a biomaterial surface; when visitors explore them by touch, the modular creatures respond with motion. The work explores the threshold at which shape and movement make us read an object as alive and intentional. Starwhisp is a room-scale audiovisual installation, a cycle that drifts between a pseudo-biological world, where entities form, exchange and dissolve, and glimpses of the synthetic construct beneath it: the algorithmic heartbeat underlying and connecting all the works. Emotional Mirror watches visitors' body language, infers the emotion in their movement, and paints it back over their reflection as a live animation drawn from their own tracked skeleton. It offers a different view of Sassoon’s method: frontier tools turned toward what he calls “machine amplification”, an explicit counter to data extraction and exploitation. The works run concurrently as a single live field in which visitors take part rather than view: their presence becomes part of the work, their gestures carrying agency in concert with the composer's own. At the heart of this amplification process is 555n, Sassoon's personal construct: simultaneously a moniker, a narrative universe, an aesthetic, and a code-based system, developed over more than a decade of research. The robotics layer was developed in collaboration with roboticist Rob Knight. Sassoon plays acoustic and analogue instruments live through 555n, his machine amplification system, on the hotel's 24th floor on 12 September, followed by a gallery visit with the artist. Curated by Alisa Lisovskaia