Instruments for Collective Resonance (working title)

During their residency at Q-O2, Joke Caimo will focus on tools and situations that create synergies between people: systems where bodies, machines, and collective energy mutually influence and amplify one another. Their interest lies in how physiological rhythms, affective states, and intimate signals can circulate between participants and form temporary communities of resonance.

A central work in this research is the Human Organ Concerto, where up to ten people become a breathing ensemble. Through the Human Organ Instrument (HOI), their breath is translated into the tones of a pipe organ. What interests them here is not just the translation from breath to sound, but how participants begin to breathe with one another — synchronizing, playfully diverging, or influencing each other’s pacing. The instrument becomes a mediator through which collective awareness emerges.

The MOODY® works similarly: it is a cyborg tool that measures and visualizes group enthusiasm. Rather than treating affect as an individual feeling, the device makes visible how excitement spreads between people, how it accumulates, and how it fluctuates through contact, attention, and presence. It reveals the group as a living organism with its own emotional currents.

They also explore intimacy as a shared communicative field. In an ongoing project using sensors and buttplug technology, they visualizs orgasmic rhythms. Not as a spectacle, but as a way to understand pleasure as a relational signal — a pulse that can be shared, mirrored, or responded to by others. It allows participants to experience intimacy as something that expands outward, connecting bodies through patterns rather than narratives.

Their collective singing practices continue this line of exploration. Koorvorming and the Megaphone-Ensemble create situations where voices blend into one acoustic body. In public space, with radio-transmitted instructions, participants sometimes sing without seeing one another, relying instead on trust, resonance, and the subtle influence of nearby voices. These formats allow people to co-regulate through sound, forming temporary vocal ecosystems.

Across all these works, their interest lies in feedback loops: how the presence of others shapes one’s own rhythm, breath, pleasure, voice, or emotional field — and how technology can amplify these subtle exchanges. At Q-O2, they aim to develop new ways of composing with these interhuman signals, creating instruments that are played not by individuals, but by the shared dynamics between them.

Joke Caimo (they/them/she/her) is an artist exploring how collective energy, intimacy, and physiological rhythms can become forms of communication. Their work creates situations in which people influence one another through breath, pleasure, voice, enthusiasm, and other subtle signals — often amplified by cyborg tools and participatory instruments. Caimo develops hybrid devices such as the Human Organ Instrument (HOI), which translates breath into organ tones and turns groups of participants into a breathing ensemble. With the MOODY®, they make collective enthusiasm visible, highlighting how affect circulates within groups. Their ongoing project visualizing orgasmic rhythms uses buttplug-based sensors to explore pleasure as a relational signal rather than an individual event. Alongside these tools, Caimo organizes collective singing practices such as Koorvorming and the Megaphone-Ensemble, where participants co-regulate through voice, resonance, and shared attention. Voices, bodies, and machines form ecosystems in which communication happens beyond language. They are co-initiator of Samenschool, an artist-run community center and print studio dedicated to collective imagination, experimental learning, and new ways of being together.