𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘵
This ongoing performance series began during my residency at outsideininsideout. During that time, I created an interactive installation set in a burned forest. I rebuilt this forest using 3D scanning and projection. White noise fills the entire environment and wipes out all concrete natural sounds. Hearing is no longer a direct perception of the “here and now”. It no longer operates like an animal’s survival sense that stays alert to every rustle of leaves. Instead, hearing is pushed back into memory and imagination. The listener has to supply the sounds that “should have been there”.
I describe this shift as a form of acoustic de-figuration. The soundscape of the site turns into a system of signs. The mind must reconstruct this system through memory, narration or onomatopoeia. Writing on sound studies and semiotics informs this approach. These texts shape how I understand white noise as a signifying layer rather than a neutral background. The noise remains fundamentally separate from the concrete events that once took place in the forest. Onomatopoeia can never fully coincide with the sound it imitates. In a similar way, this noise moves along a chain of interpretation and keeps rewriting reality. It points back to the vanished soundscape of the forest. At the same time, it gestures toward a future mode of perception that has not yet fully arrived.
A single light source also plays a key role in the work. In practice, this light is a small handheld torch. The torch flickers in the darkened space. An Arduino light sensor captures its shifting brightness and sends the data into Unreal Engine. The software uses this incoming signal to modulate the light in the virtual space in real time. Very small fluctuations, which are almost imperceptible in the physical room, become the main force that governs the virtual image.
The installation first appeared at Gallery Torhaus Wehlen in Wehlen, Germany, on 17 August 2024. It was then shown at Slug Gallery in Leipzig on 23 August 2024.
Over time, the piece gradually evolved into a tool for live visual performance. I began to combine Unreal Engine with real-time sound and with my own bodily movement. Early performance versions took place in Berlin. These included Chant of the Eclipse at Studio.db on 5 October 2024, Snakes and Ladders at Kunsthaus Kule on 8 November 2024, and a performance at Dock Digital on 19 December 2024.
As the series grew, I started to integrate sound processing in Max/MSP. I also began to build a narrative structure in which body, sound and image could no longer be treated as separate layers. This approach became central in later works. Examples include Boundary Condition at St James Garlickhythe in London (22 February and 8 August 2025), LUNA_1:QNTM_RAVE at Venue MOT in London (17 October 2024), and an(8)x ghost festival in Berlin (2025). In these situations, light, sound and movement meet live in the same space. Together, they form a more integrated way of composing and telling stories.
Boundary Condition at St James Garlickhythe is the version I feel most closely connected to so far. Light falls onto the installation and casts uncanny shadows onto the large dome and the church walls. These shadows constantly overlap with the physical architecture and with the projected image. The work moves between complete silence and dense layers of sound. It also shifts between non-verbal monologue and darkness, and between a documentary image of the world and an overlap of virtual projection and physical space. Within this unstable zone, I hide my body in the gap between what can be seen and what remains unseen.
In this work, my memory returns to a night in the forest of Saxon Switzerland. My friends from outsidein and I buried a kimchi jar deep in the ground. Microorganisms continue to ferment inside that jar across time and space. At some distant point in the future, I imagine those traces being reactivated. The subtle shifts of fermentation, the dampness of the soil, the stillness of the forest and faint electromagnetic signals from the future begin to mix in my mind. Only what stays hidden beneath the light seems to remain visible. Light weaves a new visual and sonic narrative, while everything else drifts and changes in the unknown.
In these performances, I appear in the figure of a monster. Its outer form looks aggressive, but at its core it carries a deep sadness. It does not belong to any side or any stable group. It moves between visibility and invisibility. In the light, I conceal my body. In the dark, I allow the monster’s deformities to appear. Fragmented memories tear this body apart. At the same time, they tear language apart and unsettle any fixed sense of identity. The body remains in a constant state of incompletion. It is driven by a wish to rebuild itself again and again out of mud, history and residue. I choose to appear as this kind of being. It is not held together by any idea of wholeness. It is pieced together from fractures and from things that do not quite fit. For me, this instability is not a flaw to correct but a way of existing.
