NORMAL BABYY

Normal Babyy is a Riga-based interdisciplinary art duo composed of Elza Knese and Kristofers Knesis. Their collaborative practice combines physical performance, sound, and conceptual experimentation to examine the structures—both visible and invisible—that shape perception, behavior, and meaning.

Their work has explored compulsion and self-identity (Hoarder, 2022), randomness and cognitive patterning (Apophenia, 2023), electromagnetic force and psychological charge (Charge, 2023), and the paradoxes of automation and authorship (But, please, think outside the box, 2024). Later projects have addressed sonic and affective atmospheres (Charged, 2024), emotional precarity (Dot, 2024), and speculative posthumanism (Material values, 2025), reflecting on institutional power and the illusion of autonomy.

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In 2025, the duo expanded their practice toward sensory and environmental perception. I can’t believe it’s not butter! (2025) is a concert of synthesized sounds and smells—a ritual and tribute to the fragrant tools humans use to mask less welcome aromas, exploring scent’s direct relationship with memory and emotion. Scratching the surface (2025) turns toward the Arctic, transforming climate data from the MOSAiC research expedition (2019–2020) into sound through the KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020 sonification instrument and exploring alternative ways of perceiving environmental change. Their latest work, Cheap tea (2026), examines the entanglement of ritual, consumerism, economic precarity, and nostalgia through the familiar act of drinking inexpensive tea.

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Across their practice, Normal Babyy frequently questions the boundaries between intention and influence, structure and improvisation, human agency and systemic control. By positioning non-human forces—mechanical, material, algorithmic, ecological, and economic—as co-performers, the duo opens up questions about freedom, authority, resistance, and the systems through which everyday experience is organized.