Chef d'orchestre emerged from a shared desire to explore technological alienation through the lens of Shannah and Simon’s respective fields of study: the mechanization of the working body for Shannah, and the black box system for Simon. The driving forces behind this project are empowerment, mastery of digital tools, and the reappropriation of bodies alienated by technology.

*Chef d'orchestre* seeks togive voice to gestures that are often overlooked—specifically, those of a factory worker on an assembly line. The aim of this new language is to liberate the worker’s gesture from its functional role, allowing new forms and new realities to emerge where words fall short. To view the gesture as a form of exploration, where its expression takes precedence over what it produces.

The factory has its own sonic vocabulary: a beep to speed up, empty, switch stations, and so on. What if, instead of simply following the beeps, alarms, and other audible signals from the machines, the workers’ movements could instead trigger, arrange, and layer these sounds to create a musical composition—much like a conductor?

Springs become strings, the breath of machines becomes wind instruments, and the clatter of gears becomes percussion. The arrangement of these sounds transforms these commands into phrases that are completely absurd to the factory—a way of breaking the rules, setting the noises free to create a poetic and sensitive soundscape.