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 In the exhibition gallery, from a series of hanging, outdated horn loudspeakers, the vocal snippets blend with noisy artifacts.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
#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.
Metric Displacement
Installation + Artistic Research
The Sound of Network Friction
Brian House + Annie Aries + Marcel Zaes
2021-2024
While Zoom and other online streaming platforms let us appear together online, the vast network infrastructure between us inevitably introduces delays, skips, and other temporal distortions. We usually try our best to ignore these shortcomings when we connect virtually, but Metric Displacement harnesses them instead in order to create unique rhythms.
This “site-specific” installation comprises three turntables streaming to an online meeting from three different locations spread out across the globe (Portland, OR; Bern, Switzerland; Shenzhen, China). Each turntable plays one of 18 looping lock-grooves on a vinyl record. The beat that results is unique for each listener who logs into the meeting because of the particular network conditions through which they are reached by the three streams. The piece runs continuously for a full week; as the grooves of the record begin to degrade, the artists in each location select new ones.
For more information, see “Metric Displacement: The Sound of Network Friction” in MAST, 2023 (publisher, pdf)
#Network Friction
#Low Tech Rhythm
First exhibited at Swissnex San Francisco, 2021. Presented at Geneva International Film Festival (panel), 2021; at NYCEMF New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, 2022; and at Musikfestival Bern, 2024.
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.