Global Sonic Research

Birch’s installation collapses the distinction between subject and algorithm. Participants speak into SDG-themed prompts, to have their utterances re-voiced by an AI-cloned self—evoking Derrida’s spectral “hauntology” as the self becomes a digital Doppelgänger. This work stages a post-anthropocentric linguistic uncanny, where the hallucinatory capacities of large language models confront our assumptions about agency and authenticity. By rendering the act of speaking and listening indistinguishable, Birch choreographs a new ethical Topography of Connection: one in which voice-identity and machine-intelligence co-author our relational futures.

Koroleva’s labyrinth of hyper-directional “sound lasers” transforms space into an acoustic topology, recalling Schafer’s acoustic ecology yet radicalizing it through relational aesthetics. Here, sound is not ambient but surgical – an assemblage of “sonic bubbles” that both isolate and intersect. As audiences navigate by listening alone, their bodies become interfaces, their movement a protocol of discovery. This installation reconfigures the digital-social network as a tangible maze, prompting us to question: when technology delineates our perceptual boundaries, where does connection truly reside?

Liu’s work resonates with the phenomenological trope that we hear with our bodies, situating sacred architectures as living sonic agents. By capturing acoustic responses from Korean temples and German churches, he composes a palimpsest of acoustic memory—illuminating how colonial and postcolonial power dynamics inscribe themselves in stone and sound. In doing so, each reverb becomes both archive and autonome sonic actor. His project futureproofs connection by foregrounding the reverberant traces that bind past rituals to emergent sonic publics.

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