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Sitraka

@sitraka___

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Designer @v.v.f.a & @eye___fi, Researcher @unioftheartslondon, Lecturer @csm_maid, @narrativeenvironments, @goldsmithsmadesign & @ma_fashionfutures

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Planetary Poetics (2026, 22’14”) is a film we made with @bethany.rigby

Some extracts from the film and photographs from its screening this week in Lüneburg. We made it as our contribution to Ethnographies of Outer Space: Situating Postplanetary Futures, organised by the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) network and hosted by Leuphana University.

Moving between Río Tinto in Spain, Madagascar, the Moon and Mars, the film explores different forms of intimacy with the ground. Rock-consuming microbes, relations with ancestors through Famadihana, and attempts to encounter Martian terrain from Earth, through assemblies of machinery, bring us into different kinds of proximity with worlds whose lives and histories exceed our own.

Through these encounters, we also ask ourselves how attachments take shape. How might alternative and non-extractive ways of becoming familiar with another world change what we feel entitled to do there? And how are the futures we imagine for outer space already taking shape in our relationships with places here on Earth?

Surface and ground became starting points for a shared enquiry, bringing our practices together. We’re interested in how these different intimacies might open ways of approaching the unknown through reciprocity, and how that could find expression in the things we make.

The film was screened at Scala cinema as part of the conference. It felt like such a privilege to experience it on that scale, with a big screen and a proper sound system, and to share that experience with everyone there.

Thank you to the organisers for making space for the work and the conversations around it.

#ethnographyofouterspace #ssos taken in -=Outer Space=- by @sitraka___

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17 days ago

I’ve been thinking for a while about simulation, reenactment and rehearsal, and how to design things to rehearse different encounters with places we cannot yet physically reach, and ended up making a sort of silly electric vehicle:

Mars Terrain Playback; replaying sections of Perseverance’s journey across Mars.

NASA’s record of the rover’s position is mapped onto digital elevation data of the Martian surface, reconstructing the changing slopes of the terrain along its path.

This digital reconstruction is then played back by an analogue twin built from mobility scooter wheels and a series of nested, motorised gimbal frames, with a chair mounted on top. As it moves, the gimbal frames tilt the person sitting on the chair, in an attempt to bring the distant planetary landscape down to human scale. taken in • 𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒔 • by @sitraka___

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24 days ago

Tuna is a Eurorack module that enables you to navigate a collection of sound like a 3D landscape.

Each collection contains up to 256 short samples, arranged in space using an AI embedding model so that sonically related sounds occupy neighbouring positions.

Control voltages move the playhead through the sounscape, whilst a granular engine morphs between neighbouring samples.

Each sound collection becomes its own sonic world. Currently each collection is loaded from an SD card, and is curated from an open dataset of human-labeled sound events (FSD50K). Users will also be able to import their own samples.

We will be making a small batch, and taking orders this autumn.

#modularsynth #eurorack #eyefi #tuna by @sitraka___

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2 months ago

“When Terrain Becomes Ground”
Some work-in-progress in simulation as planetary poetics… getting a rover and its digital twin to move together. taken in • 𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒔 • by @sitraka___

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2 months ago

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at @goldsmithsmadesign and used it as an opportunity to turn my slides into morphing terrains inside a browser-based game, so students could drive little cars around the ideas as I was talking through them.

The talk was about cosmology and the way material practices make propositions towards the world.

Thanks to everyone who joined and drove around, and indulged that silly experiment. by @sitraka___

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4 months ago

A few weeks ago I shared a screen-based version of an instrument creating sounds through navigating a latent space built from CLAP embeddings of sounds from the FSD50K dataset.

I’m now developing a Eurorack module version that runs on the @electrosmithco ’s Patch.Init() platform, for now, and uses CV inputs to move a playhead in three dimensions. Three CV inputs control movement across the X, Y, and Z axes of the space, while a fourth “spread” control increases the number of nearby data nodes used to feed the granular engine.

Because it would be impossible to load the full dataset of 50k+ audio samples into the module’s RAM, I’ve grouped the sounds into curated packs of 256 samples. Each pack forming its own little sound world.

The videos shown here are debugging and testing sessions where I use a browser-based 3D visualisation of the latent space to monitor navigation and behaviour.

Hopefully I’ll release a playable version soon on @eye___fi taken in London, United Kingdom by @sitraka___

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4 months ago

It has been a fun and exciting journey with the amazing @goldsmithsmadesign students, exploring how designers can imagine and create ways to communicate Synthetic Empathy for nonhumans.

Students researched how we might express social emotions that generate empathy - apology, guilt, and shame - towards diverse nonhuman agents, including AI, chairs, yeast, moss, plastic, ants, and fungi.

The project challenged them to take a non-human-centric approach, opening valuable discussions on how we usually understand and judge nonhuman domains, and how our emotional reflections shift when we attempt to express ‘empathy’ towards them. Conversations explored attachment, worship, admiration, care, sympathy, and compassion.

Come see their work at today’s small showcase at the Lesoco campus in Deptford from 4pm onwards if you’re around.

Amazing collaboration in leading and teaching with @bethany.rigby @annezzzzzz @agihaines @sitraka___ and thanks @niritbin for special guest lecture!

#Syntheticempathyfornonhumans #goldsmithsdesign #tranfocality taken in Goldsmiths, University of London by @sitraka___

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6 months ago

The last day of 2025 in the mountains by @sitraka___

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9 months ago

in the delta again by @sitraka___

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10 months ago

Few snaps (mostly taken during rehearsal) from Sound Systems: Sonic Bureau, a performance by 1st year @csm_maid students, that took place at @playhouseeast on Nov. 18th.
Following our symposium and launch just 7 weeks ago, they built, operated, demonstrated, and performed things inspired from an alternate Companies House register. taken in Playhouse East by @sitraka___

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a year ago

@v.v.f.a presents Sonic Bureau a performance by @csm_maid 1st year students.

Tickets in @v.v.f.a bio

Following the Sound Systems: Voices, Objects, Worlds symposium, Sonic Bureau extends its enquiry through sound-making, fabrication, and collective experimentation. Over several weeks, students have built instruments, devices, and systems that treat sound as both material and method to sense, to think, and speculate.

The brief took as its starting point Companies House, the UK body that records and legitimises companies, defining who can form one, who runs it, and what activities it represents. Reimagined as an alternative register, it asked: What if such a register were rewritten to reflect different concerns? What if it recognised other kinds of entities, roles, and relations? What kinds of offices, dynamics, and apparatuses might emerge? What kind of society would it make visible?

Working from fragments of this rewritten Companies House, students imagined the companies, objects, and rituals that might exist within it. Each project materialises a fragment of that world through a functioning sonic apparatus.

The performance brings these works together at @playhouseeast on November 18th! by @sitraka___

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a year ago

A couple of things I’m making along my research related work:

Cosmic Tuner (slide 1-2) is a digital instrument for navigating a latent space built from the FSD50K dataset using CLAP embeddings. Sounds in the dataset are first encoded into a shared text–audio space, then decoded through a neural model (RAVE), which generates playable audio from each point. What is navigated is the topology of the dataset’s semantic projection, meaning the spatial field shaped by how language and sound correlate.

So the interface presents this space as a 3D field. A path is traced as a straight line through it, and at each point along that line, the instrument locates the nearest available embedding from the dataset. That point’s decoded audio is then rendered using granular synthesis, to create a morphing continuous playback as the playhead moves through the field. The further a point is from the path, the more reverb and low-pass filtering is applied, making gaps in the dataset feel more diffuse or otherworldly.

So it’s not the playback of archived sounds, since everything is generated in real time.

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Grainy Flip (slide 3) stages a playable spectrum between two sampling practices: boombap-style beat slicing and granular synthesis. A single audio file is loaded and segmented into slices, which can then be shaped using a series of continuous controls to adjust timing precision, grain density, playback randomness, pitch deviation, envelope shape, and texture spread. There are no separate modes or engines. The same sound is manipulated across a continuous surface where rhythmic sampling and granular diffusion converge.

The underlying mechanisms in both traditions are similar: looping fragments, resampling, recombination. But the philosophies differ. Boombap flips draw from scarcity, tight sequencing, and a sense of homage through reuse. Granular synthesis operates in a register of abundance, fluidity, and continuous transformation. Here I’m not trying to blend these approaches but try to make that tension playable. Slices can be nudged toward percussive tightness or dissolved into clouds, held anywhere along that axis, and reworked in performance. taken in Chatsworth Road E5 by @sitraka___

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a year ago