The Last Place (Left)
Live Music Project + Music Tech Setup
Hybrid Instrumental + Technological Timbre
With Katryn Hasler (strings) and Florine Juvet (accordion)
2011
“THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is a fragile sound world which moves familiar things into a surprising light. The deliberate surrender of virtuosity and melody puts the focus entirely on the inner self of the sound and the rhythm patterns that are derived from prime number permutations. Subtly “handcrafted” electronic sounds mix inseparably with the baritone violin (low violin) and accordion, both instruments used here in a way that is reminiscent of synthesized sound. “THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is at the same time machined poetry and at times a groovy sound world, a richly composed sonic matter oscillating between ambience and beats, realized with advanced music technology, yet implemented all in real-time, on stage.
The record is available at Tonus Music Records.
This project was extensively toured between 2008 and 2012 all over Europe.
#otherbeats
Web Installation + Artistic Research
Alternative Temporalities: Playing a Participatory Rhythm Archive
2020-2022
For #otherbeats, Marcel Zaes prompted contributors across the world to send him homemade beats, ‘alternative’ metronomes and skewed pulses, recorded from their shelter-in-place locations during the pandemic with lo-fi gear. This archive of rhythm collected via social networks is displayed in a web arts project: an experimental ‘space’ that lives on a website and makes sound.
The piece is involved with different notions of time grids. Using human data for an internet-driven sound project leaves the listener with an ambiguous sonic world that oscillates between periodicity, rhythmic deviance, and what might be called a defiant networked system of arbitrary connections. #otherbeats reflects on contemporary notions of ‘technological/techno’ and ‘organic,’ of ‘grids as resistance’ and ‘otherness,’ ‘broken’ and ‘failure.’ In particular it does so by referencing to the queer, African American musical undergrounds of the 1970s via its visual language. Thereby the piece acknowledges how deeply dance music rhythms are indebted to these scenes and pays tribute to them. Zaes, by way of designing ‘alternate’ systems of networked time grids, proposes an idiosyncratic mode of thinking ‘time grids’ in digital, networked electronic music performance. #otherbeats might be neither ‘techno’ nor ‘organic,’ but in fact, both.
The piece is made exclusively with Web Audio API/JavaScript under HTML5 and uses merely filtering, convolution reverb, synthesis, compression and live mixing as its techniques. #otherbeats takes on to democratize electronic music and sound art since it replaces expensive and specialized software at elite institutions with tools as cheap, ubiquitous and accessible as the web browser.
#Participatory
#Experimental Rhythm
#Online Sound Archive
Made in 2020 as part of the larger dissertation project “Resisting the Grid – Performing Asynchrony” by Marcel Zaes at Brown University, Providence RI, USA.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
In Idle Mode (Noise)
Installation + Artistic Research
Data-Driven Sound
Fish Farming Noise Scapes in the Pearl River Delta
2022 - 2024
In Idle Mode (Noise) thematizes the ambiguous role of noise in large metropolitan areas. The work started with fieldwork in the Greater Bay Area, between the fishponds in the Pearl River Delta (Guangdong). With a computational method, the sound recordings have been analyzed, then handed to a group of professional singers, who interpreted the urban noisescape using their extended vocal techniques. In the exhibition gallery, from a series of hanging, outdated horn loudspeakers, the vocal snippets blend with noisy artifacts. LED screens form the backdrop to the hanging horns. In Idle Mode (Noise) presents a landscape in sound and visuals that is hybrid and ambiguous in many ways to produce a space of poetic reflection.
#Low Tech Sound
#High Tech Transcoding
15 horn loudspeakers, hanging from the ceiling, with cables and amplifiers; 15-channel generative sound, based on a fishpond recording reinterpreted by 7 singers; 3 low-resolution LED screens, 320 x 160mm; 1 low-resolution LED screen, 960 x 160mm; 4-channel generative video work, based on processed landscape panoramas
Production team: Yixuan Jin, Yujing Ma, Yaohan Zhang, Xuehua Fu, Hanyu Qu, Binghuang Xu, Zhaorui Lio (production); Binghuang Xu (desk research)
Singers: Zhang Waner, Xu Yuxuan, Zhang Han, Chen Caiying, Hou Mingrui, Xie Jiajun, Zhang Yujie
Thanks for support and inspiration: Xiao Jian, Xi Lei, Chen Dong, Jin Zhuosheng
Exhibited at Shunde Food Museum (Greater Bay Area), 2022; and at Wuhan Biennale, 2024-2025
High Sections / Low Leaps
Installation + Artistic Research
Speculative Urbanism between Low and High Tech
In collaboration with Zhen Wu, Tristan Braud, Sylvia Lee
2023-2024
This work is based on urban speculations inspired by the fast developing, fast-paced Shenzhen City in the Greater Bay Area, and more precisely, on a small neighborhood in its Longgang District far North of the center, which is currently undergoing urban development. This neighborhood, changing from farmland to a highly developed urban space in only a few decades, has inspired the artist to produce an art installation that uses an idiosyncratic mixed method involving custom-made sound design, AIGC, 3D modeling and rendering, simulation of the actual city, and a spatial installation setup with CRT monitors to reflect on potential and alternative futures of this neighborhood in a far distant time. The work reflects the relationship between construction noise, mechanical low-tech sound, urban development and so-called “high-tech parks.” The artist team presents a work that lets the viewer perceive a distant future through visual and sonic technologies. The key is that cities are increasingly technological, not only at their core of how they are built, maintained and controlled as “smart cities,” but also in the sense that humans who live, work and travel in cities use screens, earbuds, loudspeakers, cars and so on to navigate, use, and access the environment. This artwork posits that, in turn, these technologies and media change the ways in which humans perceive their surroundings – and AI as a novel form of mediator of existing content plays a crucial role in shaping contemporary human perception of the world.
#High Tech Cities
#Low Tech Sound
Production team: Zhen Wu (3d modeling), Tristand Braud (3d rendering), Sylvia Lee (AIGC), Minghim Tong (sound design), Zhaorui Liu (CRT shooting), Binghuang Xu (desk research), Yang Gu (assistance)
Exhibited at SeeD Pilot Project Exhibition, Shenzhen, 2023
Low Tech CitySound
Installation + Participatory Electronics Sound Walk
Shenzhen’s Urban Sounds Through Low Tech Electronics
In Collaboration with Bo Dong + Zhaorui Liu
2024
“Low-Tech CitySound” is a project in which 11 young adults built their own low-tech audio recorders and took these recorders on a soundwalk through Shenzhen to collect site-specific sounds from the city. In the installation on display, the audience interacts with the mediated sounds via a custom-made interface, thereby producing a narrative out of the sound recordings and accompanying location video fragments. “Low-Tech CitySound” is based on a workshop that the SUSTech School of Design’s Sound Studies Group conducted earlier this year, where young adults learnt to solder electronic circuits and design their own shape of a wearable recorder. These devices look like low-tech electronics but have high-tech features that allow them to record, store, and playback environmental recordings. The participants used the self-made wearable recorders to capture sounds of their liking in the city, and brought them back into the exhibition, where we can relive their individual perspectives on the soundscape of Shenzhen. Yet, this present soundscape is highly mediated and “distorted” through technology that blends “low-fi” with “high-fi” – thereby reflecting the core spirit of Shenzhen. “Low-Tech CitySound” explores how technology and cities are always connected in diverse ways, showing the intersectional space of low and high tech.
#Shenzhen Soundscape
#Low Tech Electronics
#Participatory
Production team: Bo Dong (workshop, installation), Zhaorui Liu (electronics + tech development), Simeng Wang (workshop), Binghuang Xu (field work)
The workshop took place at, and first public exhibition, at SeeD Creative Commune’s “SeeDling Art Fair,” Shenzhen, 2024.
Exhibited at the Chinese CHI Symposium (juried exhibition), Shenzhen, 2024.