Global Sonic Research

Boundaries of Agency invites audiences to step into a conversation between themselves and AI exploring identity, data, AI, and sustainability. The exhibition space becomes a responsive voice laboratory where participants become both subjects and co-creators. Participants will hear their voices answer questions related to The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals in AI-cloned versions of their own voices.

This feedback loop unfolds inside a spatial sound environment. As more voices are added, the installation performance grows into a collective sound sculpture that concludes in a live performance — blending participant voices with sonified data such as world temperature anomalies and live data-driven instrumentation.

The work transforms debates about AI ethics into an embodied, emotion and thought-provoking experience, asking:

• Where do we draw the line between technological innovation and identity protection?
• What does connection mean when human and machine speak with the same voice?

Rather than simply observing, participants feel the ethical stakes of AI — through the unsettling experience of hearing themselves say what they never said. Each visit ends with a reflective feedback moment, creating a growing archive of community responses to the question: How do we want to share our voices with AI?

Through this interplay of sound art, technology, and critical inquiry, Boundaries of Agency turns debates about AI ethics into a deeply personal encounter — sparking conversation, reflection, and collective imagination about the futures we are building.

Sound Cage: A Sonic Labyrinth of Connection transforms the space into an invisible auditory labyrinth, where discrete sound vectors guide participants through attentive listening. The listener’s journey acts as a metaphor for digital and social networks, revealing how signals isolate and intersect. At intersections, overlapping streams produce unpredictable sonic fusions, forming transient sonic bubbles that highlight the paradox of isolation through connection.

The installation positions the body as a perceptual interface, making movement a method of exploration. Sound Cage: A Sonic Labyrinth of Connection investigates how spatial sound can mediate relational experience, creating fleeting moments of shared presence and perceptual resonance. 

Quasi-Spiritual Sonic Nexus explores the spatial information embedded within sounds commonly regarded as possessing sacred qualities. Since antiquity, across cultures in Asia, Europe, and beyond, the attributes of sound spectra have played a crucial role in catalyzing affective states, functioning as liminal thresholds to spiritual dimensions. These sounds have served not merely as acoustic events but as phenomenological bridges between material and transcendent realms.

In this context, the artist deconstructs the structure of these sacred resonances and vibrating objects using specialized digital techniques, including physical modeling, ray tracing in acoustic room simulation, and transient separation. The deconstructed elements are then recombined in unexpected ways during the performance, with triggers, structures, and pathways visualized through light-based and graphic projections. Through this process, the artist seeks to uncover the universal qualities of sacred sounds and speculate on emerging forms of digital sacredness.

Together, these three projects chart a resonant cartography of “Futureproofing Connection,” uniting architectural reverb, voice-machine symbiosis, and spatialized sonic navigation. They embrace sound as medium that foregrounds the entanglements of history, identity, and power in the making of collective experience. We eagerly anticipate their research and performances at ZKM Hertzlab and HELLERAU, where each process and performance of the fellows will activate dialogues.

Jury Members:

Dr. Lea Luka Sikau (she/her), ZKM I Hertzlab
Moritz Lobeck (he/him), HELLERAU
Katharina Meissner (she/her), MUTEK 
Kohui (he/him), sound artist