Faculty of Art

Experimental Animation

Samuel Wasserman

Would You Still Love Me If I were a Worm

"Would you still love me if I were a worm" is an audio-visual nervous system driven by living worms in real time. Sensors in a vermicompost habitat translate data representative of an intangible underground world into a tangible human experience through light, animation, and music played back on a hand built soundsystem. Conceptually, this installation uses worms as a literal and metaphorical reference to underground spaces and people less perceived.

“What does it mean to exist in spaces less perceived? Spaces where societal hierarchy and identity dissolve in the safety of shadowed soil. What do those spaces look, sound, and feel like? Spaces where structures soften, bodies blur into their fluid selves, and new perceptions are formed. The underground is unrestricted by social norms, devoid of mainstream commercial institutions, and sustainably self-regulated by its own dynamics. It exists as a safe haven for love, identity, expression, art, and music. The humble earthworm is both a literal and metaphorical ode to the underground. To share a moment with a worm, however briefly, is to experience the world not as it seems in front of you, but as it feels within you.Would You Still Love Me If I were a Worm is a living, breathing audio-visual nervous system driven by worms in real time. The installation consists of a red wiggler vermicompost habitat that acts as a functional brain, creatively conducting lights, animation, and music via Artnet to a crawling network of light fixtures, frames to a cathode-ray television, and midi to physical electronic instruments for playback on a custom high-fidelity club-capable sound system. The habitat contains sensors that detect worm activity through movement and environmental conditions like temperature, humidity, pH, and ambient pressure, translating intangible data representative of an unperceived underground world into a tangible human experience.This project began back in September 2025 with the intent of designing a sound system that was an anti-thesis to the mass-produced, commercially available black speaker boxes commonly found in bars and DIY spots. The design favoured something that was conceptually in line with the principles of a DIY, free spirited underground and something that was as visually stimulating as it was sonically. Over the months that followed, The Big Worm was built, laying the foundation for this installation and providing it with sonic life. The stack brings together a Birch plywood finished 3-way design featuring a unique, 18” sealed bi-resistive subwoofer, a horn loaded 10" lower-midrange enclosure, and a vintage Altec theatre horn sealed in a rubberized anti-resonant coating, culminating harmoniously to deliver an airy top end, a warm punchy midrange, and a tight and articulate low frequency response with presence felt down below 30hz in club environments and 20hz in listening environments. At those frequencies near the bottom range of human hearing, sound shifts away from something heard into something felt. To feel with one’s entire body rather than to hear through a single sense is to feel the shadowed underground become transparent and experience the world as a worm. ”