Installation Showcase

Program Overview

Michael Trommer

Past Tense – Exploring Idleness and Boredom as Compositional Strategies 
Julian Rubisch

UkuPlay: The Huggable Ukulele
Xingxing Yang

Flower.Mirror 
Yuxin Chen

MirRaspiju
Emanuele Sara

F L W R: A generative audiovisual work of small file media
Arne Eigenfeldt, Jim Bizzocchi and Simon Overstall

The Emille Bell: Resonance of Absence and the Abyss.
Yongwoo Lee

 

About the pieces & artists

Michael Trommer: Empty Sets

Empty Sets is an audio-led ambisonic, 3D-animated virtual reality installation that situates the auditor within the depleted landscape of the technological sublime. Environments are vacated; drones and Cybertrucks patrol within a perpetual penumbra as missives of an unknown, unseen power; billboards stand as eerily emptied ciphers, their marketing-speak unmoored, haunting the liminal spaces of a topography that is characterized by, as media theorist Sean Cubitt puts it, a “becoming-environment of information” (Cubitt 2013, 489). Empty Sets can be configured as either a headset-based or dome-based installation.

About the artist

Michael Trommer is a Toronto-based sound and video artist; his practice has been focused primarily on psychogeographical and acoustemological explorations of anthropocentric space via the use of spatial and tactile sound, field recordings, VR, immersive installation and expanded cinema. He has released material on an unusually diverse roster of labels, both under his own name as well as ‘sans soleil’. These include Transmat, Wave, Ultra-red, and/OAR, Audiobulb, Audio Gourmet, Gruenrekorder, Impulsive Habitat, Stasisfield, Serein, Flaming Pines, 3leaves, Unfathomless and con-v. His audio-visual installation work has been exhibited at Australia’s Liquid Architecture festival, Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt, Cordoba’s art:tech, St. Petersburg’s Gamma Festival, and Köln’s soundLAB, among others. Michael has performed extensively in North America, Europe and Asia, including events with members of Berlin’s raster-noton collective, as well as the 2008 and 2013 editions of Mutek’s acclaimed a/visions series. He also regularly improvises with Toronto-based AI audio-visual collective ‘i/o media’. In addition to teaching graduate sound design and sound art at George Brown College, Michael also teaches Sound Film at Toronto Metropolitan University, Think Tank at OCAD University and Media Practice and Sonic Cinema at York University, where he is a PhD graduate and SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral scholar in Cinema and Media Art.

 

Julian Rubisch: Past Tense – Exploring Idleness and Boredom as Compositional Strategies 

Past Tense is a participatory, long-term sound installation inspired by “idle” games—systems that evolve on their own and invite only occasional interaction. Small sounds captured from the environment, electronics, radio, and visitors slowly accumulate, forming a growing sonic mass. Participants may briefly intervene, releasing short sonic gestures be-fore the system settles back into its autonomous flow. This process, informed by the idea that such games can reveal a “worldness” (as opposed to “gameness” characterized by a flow state) where players transcend the game mechanics to find new ways of self-expression, allows a self-referential musical memory to unfold from a small kernel of inputs over time and past sonic material to re-enter and reshape future states.

About the artist

Julian Rubisch, born in Vienna in 1981, is a freelance sound artist, software engineer, and electroacoustic composer.

He has presented performances and installations at prestigious venues such as ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, Francisco Carolinum Linz, Alte Schmiede Vienna, ORF Ö1 Kunstradio, and others.

He loves to explore boundaries and interfaces:
– Between sound art and music,
– Between order and chaos,
– Of perception and the different realms and phenomenologies of listening

 

Xingxing Yang: UkuPlay: The Huggable Ukulele

UkuPlay reimagines the ukulele’s interaction model by leveraging the unique material affordances of e-textiles to create a soft, monolithic, and huggable interface. By utilizing a deformable textile structure, the system establishes a tactile feedback loop that integrates the instrument’s sensing capabilities directly into its physical form. Through the embedding of capacitive properties into a plush cushion, UkuPlay transcends its role as a domestic object to function as a high-fidelity, expressive instrument.
Visitors are invited to explore this blur between “comfort-oriented soft goods” and “performance hardware”. Through intuitive gestures—such as strumming and fretting the fabric—the installation demonstrates how e-textile “smart matter” captures nuanced, multi-dimensional performance data. UkuPlay offers a vision of future musical tools where tangible intimacy and expressive power coexist seamlessly.

About the artist

Xingxing Yang is an interdisciplinary computer musician based in Hong Kong. She is a Ph.D. student at HKUST, specializing in computer-assisted audio, music, and haptics. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Music Tech from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Stanford University. She is interested in making novel sound toys, doing AI-assisted music composition, and building VR storytelling experiences,s and constructive tools for builders.

 

Yuxin Chen: Flower.Mirror 

Flower.Mirror is a poetry-driven multimedia interactive game that explores the interplay of poetry, sound, and visual space. The program guides its player through dream-like landscapes, where the player puzzles through and trigger stages of the game by constructing texts into poetic phrases. Instead of a goal-oriented structure, the experience unfolds in a meditative and contemplative state, allowing each gesture, sound, and transition to take its time. The player is invited into a slower mode of exploration, one that emphasizes listening, patience, and reflection, and gradually enters the inter-cultural narrative embedded within the project.

As its title suggests, Flower.Mirror unfolds across two chapters: “Mirror” and “Flower,” where each is a multi-staged miniature poetic game. “Mirror” reflects a period in the artist’s life marked by anemoia—the reconstruction of memory around an idealized hometown that never truly existed, formed during her first experience studying abroad. The player engages with language as a compositional material, modulating nouns with verbs and adjectives by aligning words hori-zontally, as if writing a poem in the space. Decisions regarding text placement directly shape the sound: the size of a selected text determines its associated sound’s volume, while the drop location of the text affects its stereo panning.

“Flower” represents a stage of reconciliation. In this chapter, the artist quietly looks back on her childhood self, recogniz-ing the beauty of uncertainty and unknowing, and learning to embrace her past and present selves. These personal narra-tives are presented not as fixed stories, but as fragments—moments that surface, dissolve, and reappear through interac-tion. Across multiple stages, players align words to initiate musical development before transitioning into a navigational mode, where hidden words are discovered and collected within a darkened visual field. The interaction becomes increas-ingly embodied, shifting from writing to movement and presence.

The ideas of “Flower” and “Mirror” are deeply intertwined in traditional Chinese culture. The project draws inspiration from Dream of the Red Chamber, where the concept of 镜花水月 (“Mirror, Flower, Water, Moon”) is a recurring theme. Often translated as “flower in the mirror, moon on the water,” the phrase describes a beauty that is vivid yet transient. Through this lens, the project observes the worldly concerns tied to intercultural identity, how they evolve over time, rise and fall in cycles of yin and yang, and eventually soften into reconciliation. Our life, like the flower in the mirror, is filled at times with loneliness and sorrow, at others with joy and tenderness, yet remains a fleeting experience.

About the artist

Michelle Chen (Yuxin Chen, and also known as Morning Close) is a composer and interactive-media artist whose work spans installations and soundtracks for VR, game, animation, and film. Among the projets she worked on as lead, indie game “Displacemen” was nominated as the Best Student Game at GDC IGF 2025.

Michelle is currently a master’s student at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where she explores the interplay of text, visual music, and a humanistic ap-proach to AI as a creative tool. Her practice is characterized by nonlinear storytelling and a poetic sen-sibility that runs through both her music and interactive media works. Across these pieces, she often constructs a serene, contemplative world that gradually reveals an underlying contrasting or dual nature.

 

Emanuele Sara: MirRaspiju

MirRaspiju is an interactive sound installation that transforms a physical mirror into a performative sonic interface. The work explores the relationship between self-perception, gesture, and sound through an object that is simultaneously visual, acoustic, and responsive. A one-way mirrored glass panel becomes both a reflective surface and a sound-emitting body, allowing the visitor to see themselves while generating sound through their own presence and gestures.
The installation consists of a unidirectional mirror mounted on a wall or pedestal, behind which a camera is concealed. The mirror itself is equipped with contact transducers, enabling the glass surface to vibrate and act as the sole sound source. When no one is present, the system remains silent; sound emerges only when a person approaches and looks into the mirror, establishing an intimate, one-to-one interaction.
Gestural and facial data are captured in real-time via computer vision techniques implemented in Python using OpenCV and MediaPipe. Hand movements, facial expressions, mouth openings , and eye closures are mapped to parameters controlling the playback and transformation of four preloaded audio buffers. These buffers consist of granular textures created in Max/MSP and processed through an original algorithm based on elastic sound transformation, where rhythmic and timbral structures are continuously deformed by varying buffer playback speed and modulation parameters.
The core audio engine is developed in Max/MSP and exported to RNBO, then compiled into native C++ code running on a Raspberry Pi 5. This embedded architecture allows the installation to operate autonomously, without external computers, ensuring low latency and stable performance in exhibition contexts. The entire system is self-contained and battery-powered, facilitating flexible installation logistics.
Each buffer is associated with a specific type of interaction: hand gestures modulate playback speed, amplitude, filtering, and waveform modulation; mouth openings control texture density and temporal flow; eye closures activate reverberation parameters. These interactions generate a continuously evolving soundscape that responds directly to the visitor’s bodily presence, transforming the act of looking at oneself into a compositional gesture.
MirRaspiju positions the mirror as a liminal medium between vision and sound, presence and transformation. Rather than functioning as a spectacle-driven interface, the work emphasizes minimal, introspective interaction, inviting visitors to listen to their own reflected image. The installation proposes a form of embodied listening in which perception, gesture, and sound are inseparably linked, transforming a familiar object into a subtle yet expressive musical instrument.

About the artist

Emanuele Sara is an Electroacoustic Composition Bachelor student at the Conservatoire “Luigi Canepa” in Sassari under the guidance of professor Walter Cianciusi, then attending specialization courses in music applied to images and pop compositions held by Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Roma, Centro Europeo di Toscolana scuola di Mogol, various seminars such as Sergi Jordà, Silvia Lanzalone, Riccardo Mantelli, he leads his sound experiments into the field of electronic music creating his own code of signs, acoustics and visual symbols.
Born in Ossi, Italy (1986) in addition to composing electronic music he performs as a singer-songwriter since 2008 with several albums released. Sara’s compositions have been performed in various festivals and events, including Conservatoire “Canepa” Sassari, Conservatoire “Respighi” Latina, Conservatoire “Palestrina” Cagliari, Festival Spazio Musica Cagliari.
As interpreter Sara wears a pseudonym “Namowam” and produced the electronics for several contemporary composition.

 

Arne Eigenfeldt, Jim Bizzocchi and Simon Overstall: F L W R: A generative audiovisual work of small file media

A generative audio-visual work of small file media. Five videos consisting of a slow pan over flowers, ranging in dura-tion from 41 to 72 seconds, were compressed using five different algorithms to create 25 files of a size less than 1.44 MB each. This database is accessed by a generative audiovisual system to create scenes of five related videos, slowly fading between them at a playback ranging from 11% to 33%. Each scene was combined with a generative audio stretched an equal amount. The end result of F L W R is a generative sampling of the visual poetics of video compression.

About the artists

Arne Eigenfeldt is a composer of live electroacoustic music, and a researcher into intelligent generative music systems. His music has been performed around the world, and his collaborations range from Persian Tar masters to free improvisers to contemporary dance companies to musical robots. He has presented his research at major conferences and festivals, and published over 60 peer-reviewed papers on his research and collaborations.

Jim Bizzocchi is a filmmaker currently working in video art and installation. His research interests include the aesthetics and design of the moving image, interactive narrative, and the development of computational video sequencing systems. He is interested in the effect of new technologies on cinematic visual expressions such as split-screens, layered imagery, image transitions, and stereoscopic cinema.

Simon Lysander Overstall is a computational media artist, and musician/composer from Vancouver, Canada. He develops works with generative, interactive, or performative elements. He is particularly interested in computational creativity in music, physics-based sound synthesis and performance in virtual environments, and biologically and ecologically inspired art and music systems. He has produced custom performance systems and interactive art installations that have been shown in Canada, the US, Europe, and China.

 

Yongwoo Lee: The Emille Bell: Resonance of Absence and the Abyss.

Some sounds can no longer be struck. Under the names of preservation, protection, and history, they have been removed from direct experience. The Emille Bell remains as form, sound, and legend. Its story—of a monk sacrificing an infant in pursuit of a “good sound”—has shaped a normative understanding of what a bell should sound like, while obscuring the social contexts and repeated failures embedded in its making.
This work explores an alternative way of engaging with sonic heritage under such conditions. It reconstructs the form and sound of the bronze Emille Bell through physical modeling, while simultaneously presenting an imaginary bell that never existed: the bell that failed to be realized within the legend itself. The Bell of Absence emerges from narrative omissions, distortions, and the traces of failure that have been historically excluded.
In this project, physical modeling is not treated as a tool of faithful reproduction. Instead, it functions as a speculative medium. Physical parameters—such as shape, material, and resonance—are not optimized for acoustic accuracy but are used as compositional materials through which absence and deviation can be articulated. The Bell of Absence is intentionally configured with unstable structures and low-frequency resonances, producing sounds that diverge from traditional criteria of bell timbre.
Here, absence does not signify silence or lack. It is understood as a structural condition shaped by historical and narrative choices. Resonance becomes the means through which this absence remains audible—as vibration, instability, and persistence rather than resolution. Rather than reproducing an idealized sound, this work listens to what was never allowed to fully emerge, allowing failed and omitted sounds to resonate in the present.

About the artist

Yongwoo Lee is a composer deeply interested in the humanities and aesthetics. He studied history and fusion culture content development as an undergraduate, with a minor in composition. His musical perspective has been shaped by diverse life experiences, including work as a student researcher at the History and Culture Archive Center and CREAMA (Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music and Audio), as well as his roles as a Conscripted Firefighters Agent (CFA) and cultural interpreter. Through these experiences, he approaches composition as a process of transforming lived experience into sound, while also engaging with technical research, particularly in integrating physical modeling techniques into his compositional practice.