Dec 23. 2024 - Latest News

Exhibition | "In Idle Mode (Noise)" Featured at the 2024 Wuhan Biennale

The media art section of the 2024 Wuhan Biennale, "Future Encoding: Signals of the Perceiver," grandly opened on October 5th. This exhibition aims to explore a kind of perception that blends biological wetware, mineral hardware, and digital and environmental energies. The inherent rheology of the digital echoes the fluidity of water bodies, revealing the intrinsic relationship between the digital and the natural.

This exhibition rethinks the ontology of life under social relations and technological influence through diverse media and rich forms of expression. The works present connections that transcend temporal and spatial scales between more than just human entities and illustrate an ecological aesthetics steeped in planetary thinking and a material-digital-spiritual trinity. It offers the audience an artistic feast concerning life, social relations, and technological impact.

Among the exhibits, Assistant Professor Marcel Zaes Sagesser from the SUSTech School of Design brought his multimedia sound installation work—"In Idle Mode (Noise)". This piece is a multimedia sound installation project that creates an immersive experiential field for the audience.

"In Idle Mode (Noise)" Exhibition Scene

Inspiration

The work originated in 2022, inspired by an interest in the loudspeaker as a visual symbol and field research on fish ponds in the Pearl River Delta of the Greater Bay Area. The title refers to the "idle mode" sound of speakers—when the device is on but temporarily not in use. The 2024 version has been redesigned and expanded based on the Biennale's theme, which resonates with the concepts of digital rheology and water fluidity proposed by the exhibition.

Content

The work focuses on the ambiguous theme of noise in the metropolis. It collects noise from the fish pond environment, uses algorithms to analyze this noise and generate a musical score. This score is then given to a group of professional singers who use extended vocal techniques to interpret the urban noise landscape. These field-recorded sounds are again influenced by computer algorithms, organizing them in time and space, creating a sound situated between sung music and produced noise pollution.

Immersive Experience

Moving through the exhibition hall, visitors see a series of outdated horn speakers suspended in the air, playing vocal fragments and noise artifacts.

LED screens serve as the background for the suspended speakers, with four screens simultaneously displaying different visual landscapes. The video content is based on a large dataset of photos (over 100) of actual fish ponds from the Greater Bay Area. A generative algorithm selects from this data pool and blends them to form new, fictional, yet reality-based landscapes. The LED medium participates in this process of observing real landscapes through technology, thereby exploring the relationship between us humans and technology.

"In Idle Mode (Noise)" presents an audio-visual landscape—hybrid and ambiguous in many aspects—aiming to create a poetic space for reflection for the viewer.

About the Work

Artist

Marcel Zaes Sagesser

Work Title

In Idle Mode (Noise)

Work Type

Multimedia Installation (Dimensions Variable)

Year of Creation

2022-2024

Production Team

Production Assistants: Jin Yixuan, Liu Zhaorui, Xu Binghuang

Vocal Performance: Zhang Wan'er, Xu Yuxuan, Zhang Han, Chen Caiying, Hou Mingrui, Xie Jiajun, Zhang Yujie (The School of Music, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

Photo/Video Team

Ma Yujing, Liu Zhaorui, Fu Xuehua, Zhang Yaohan