Transition to 8: When Pulse Becomes Rhythm

What would happen if the rhythm of a musical piece were not just sound, but the actual pulse of a community?

Transition to 8 is not just a research project. It is a living, breathing experiment on how art, community, and technology can interact to tell stories that are rarely heard. MENTOR, which conceived the idea and designed the project’s methodology, harnesses the historical and political power of electronic music, transforming collective emotion and experience into raw material for contemporary artistic creation.

Electronic Music: From the Shadows to the Spotlight

Electronic music has always been political since its inception. Born within underground scenes, by Black, Latin American, and LGBTQ+ communities, it became a space for expression, freedom, and coexistence. It did not follow classical norms but shattered them, creating new spaces—both real and imagined.

From the soulful basslines of house, to the sounds of techno, and the repetitive swirls of trance, electronic music carries within it collective memory, resistance, and desire.

Transition to 8 is deeply connected to this tradition.

Why Did We Choose Electronic Music?

Because it is inclusive.

Because it is political.

Because it is experiential.

Because it can condense the pulse of an era.

Electronic music has the unique ability to incorporate social tensions, collective demands, subjective experiences, and technological innovations. It is a genre born out of necessity. Out of the need for voices where there was no audience. Out of the need to dance in the dark and find light in the bass.

For MENTOR, the choice of electronic music in Transition to 8 is entirely intentional: it is a field where experimentation meets the democracy of expression. Where the body becomes a means of communication. Where rhythms can embody collective feeling, pain, anticipation, anxiety, and ultimately, hope.

Cities Are Not Only What We See, But What We Feel Within Them. Electronic music, through its rhythm and structure, contains these psychological topographies. This is why, for MENTOR, the genre is chosen not only for its aesthetic value, but for its capacity to function as a therapeutic surface that records social tensions.

From Lived Experience to Sonic Transformation

At the heart of Transition to 8 lies an innovative, participatory process.

Everything begins with sociodrama sessions, open to the community, where participants collectively explore the most pressing social issues that concern them. During these sessions, participants wear sensors that record biometric data: heart rate, skin conductance, movement in space.

These bodily reactions -alive, raw- are translated into sound and image. They feed into the project's digital platform, which functions as a space for collecting and processing this material. There, DJs and music producers, as well as visual artists, will have access to the data and will transform it into new, original (musical) works.

Sound thus becomes a carrier of the social pulse and emerges from the inner life of the city, as it is manifested in the bodies of its inhabitants.

From Community to Art -and Back Again

Transition to 8 is not just an artistic project. It is an experience that begins with the individual, is recorded through the body, processed through technology, and returns as art to the very community that created it.

Contemporary Creators: The Voices of Today

Electronic music, from its very beginning, has been a field of experimentation and innovation. Today, more than ever, creators active in the realm of electronic sound continue to connect their work with social and political conditions, approaching music not only as an art form but also as an act of positioning, as a tool for community building.

The relationship with the body, sexuality, heteronormativity, gender, race, technology, and the ongoing need for expressive space is ever-present. Many of these creators use music to create safe environments, to re-signify the concept of identity, or to claim new spaces of participation.

Contemporary production is more DIY-friendly than ever. Home studios, open-source tools, digital collaborative environments, and the global dissemination of sound allow creators to speak through their music without being dependent on institutions or markets.

Eleusis: From Industrial Memory to the Sound of the Future

Eleusis is not only a place of memory. It is also a field of transformation. Its relationship with labor, post-industrial abandonment, environmental degradation, as well as with enduring spirituality and ritual, makes it an ideal sonic landscape for Transition to 8.

In this city, sound is not decorative. It is a historical record. Its pulse beats not only in the present—it beats beneath, within, and around a rich stratigraphy of time, experience, and memory.

With Transition to 8, Eleusis is placed on the global map of electronic music not as a new “hotspot,” but as a living field of artistic creation and social reflection.

The Transition to 8 platform functions as an archive of collective emotion. Every sound, every image, every shift in intensity or rhythm carries the memory of a body, an experience, a social reality.

Technology is not merely a tool for production. It is a tool for translation, and digital arts are the medium for expressing shared feelings.

Toward a Socially Responsible Cultural Policy

The project functions as a model for a new methodology of cultural management: participatory, embodied, and conscious of the emotional dimension of urban life. It integrates the values of contemporary urban theory through trust, empathy, community activation, and their empowerment through art.

The cities of the future do not only need sustainable infrastructure—they need empathy, care, and solidarity. Transition to 8 is a bold attempt to attune to the needs of the community and transform them into a collective narrative through performative art.

Transition to 8: Bridging social issues, tech and contemporary art (T2EΔΚ-00623) was a research project coordinated by MENTOR Cultural Production and Management Company and implemented in collaboration with Athena Research Center and the Laboratory of Quality Research in Psychology and Mental Health of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens’ Department of Psychology. The project is co-funded by Greece and the European Union as part of the Operational Programme Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation under the single RTDI State Aid Action "Research-Create-Innovate B' Cycle" 2014-2020 (EPAnEK). 

“Transition to 8: European societies in flux” is a Creative Europe project implemented by MENTOR, the Museum of Transitory Arts (Slovenia), Electroni[k] (France) and Today Art Initiative (Armenia) and it is co-funded by the European Union.