Pond Brain is an art installation by Jenna Sutela featuring interactive sound by Victor Shepardson. It is now part of the collection of the contemporary art museum in Catello di Rivoli. Victor traveled to Italy to install the piece for the 2025 exhibition, which is open now.

Pond Brain was previously shown in Yet, It Moves! at Copenhagen Contemporary and in the Helsinki Biennial 2023.

Pond Brain

In Jenna’s words:

Pond Brain is an instrument and a fountain: a bowl of rainwater made out of bronze that can be played or activated by touch (aka statue rubbing). The shape of the pond is reminiscent of a head. It is my neuroplastic portrait. In the spirit of a Chinese spouting bowl, or a German Wasserspringschale, interaction with the object not only produces musical vibration, but also creates patterns on the surface of the water inside it. As the sonic vibrations increase, water droplets start to bounce up from the surface.

Sounds from the pond resonate with an artificial neural network trained to respond to environmental and interplanetary sounds. The network tunes into sonic frequencies from the bowl and plays back an array of alien resonations. As sound flows around in homeostatic loops through the air and through different machine learning models, which exude an air of alternative dimensions, it is constantly transforming and thus exhibiting a life cycle of its own.

Read more in an interview with Jenna for BOMB Magazine.

View from outside the chapel in Castello di Rivoli