Project Description For a long time, we have understood time and life only through human-centered perception. Yet every living being experiences time differently, and the ability to sense and resonate with those differences still feels unfamiliar. Consonance explores how we might “listen” to the unique temporalities of life that humans cannot easily perceive. At its core is a “living” instrument and incubator built around an LP that gradually biodegrades through bacterial activity. Two kinds of sound emerge: one from the decomposing LP itself, and another from the interaction between light and record. As the LP breaks down, the sound distorts; this transformation, linked to optical devices, produces vibrations of light and an audiovisual resonance. The unpredictable rhythms of the bacteria continuously reshape sound and light, immersing the audience in an experience of biological time. Consonance invites us to imagine technology not as a means of controlling life, but as a way of attuning to its flows—resonating and living alongside it. To “listen” here is not merely an auditory act, but a bodily attitude of responding to the rhythms of life. Within the quiet flows of sensation—emerging without design, through life, chance, and time—we are asked anew what it means to be alive. Consonance: from the Latin con- (“together”) and sonare (“to sound”), denotes a state of resonance where different rhythms and flows align. Here it signifies the moment when unfamiliar rhythms of life and time sound together, creating a new sense of aliveness beyond human perception. About the Creator Psients x Jeffrey Jehwan Kim, part of ZER01NE alumni, is a project group that draws on expertise spanning bioart, sound, and architecture to explore the movements of life as they emerge within technology. For this project, they collaborate with Elias Chemali and Soyoung Lee, further extending their experiments with sensation and life. Focusing on consonance between sensation and time, life and technology, the group proposes new sensory environments that go beyond traditional artistic forms. Through this project, they reveal the artistic possibilities of a world in which technology and life affect one another and coexist in resonance.

Curator's Note Human beings have long understood time and life only within the limits of their own perception. Yet every living being has its own temporality, and the ability to sense and resonate with these different rhythms remains an unfinished task. Consonance begins from this rupture in perception. Between biological time, technological time, and artistic time, what do we recognize as “alive,” and what can we hear? Rather than answering this question directly, the project builds an instrument and simulator that makes perceptible the temporalities of life beyond human grasp, creating an experimental environment for the expansion of sensation. The project Consonance can be described as a ‘living’ incubator-instrument that plays an LP gradually decomposed by bacteria. The work materializes the interplay of sound, light, and temporal flow. Listening to the distorted resonance produced as the LP biodegrades, it becomes clear that the LP is no longer just a medium of playback but a conduit transforming material decomposition itself into musical experience. Over time, the LP dissolves; this change directly alters the physical conditions of sound and the passage of light. The bacteria’s digestive rhythms bend the audio, which in turn synchronizes with responsive light devices in the space, unfolding as a kinetic, audiovisual performance. As the LP disappears, the performance ends—not as mechanical closure, but as a material event that reveals the entanglement of life, technology, time, and contingency. Developed over years of research, the project resists reducing bacteria to a tool or romanticizing the idea of “life.” Instead, it confronts the illusion of technological permanence and efficiency, exposing the futility of techno-fetishism and the repetitive urge to “solve” problems with more technology. While the term “biodegradable” may recall ecological concerns like waste, pollution, or sustainability, here it gestures to something more fundamental: the experiment of uncontrollability. As a ‘living instrument,’ Consonance is not simply an incubator of life but a simulator that stages the encounters with forms of life beyond human control. This process of tuning sound, light, life, and technology is not mere interaction but a form of consonance—a co-resonant imbalance between creation and dissolution. Like Pauline Oliveros’ notion of Deep Listening, the project asks how we might listen to the subtle rhythms of life, expanding not only the structures of sound but also the environments that generate it, the density of perception, and the attentiveness of the body that listens. As Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr suggest in Keep it Warm – Incubators as Simulators, the site where life and technology meet is always ambiguous and political. The incubator is not merely a nurturing device but an audiovisual laboratory where we encounter uncontrollable “life.” By situating itself within bacterial temporality, Consonance visualizes not balance but the resonant instability between technology and life. To listen, here, is to confront the question: whose life is being sensed? Tracing a path through harmony, resonance, and consonance, the project ultimately explores, through the medium of sound, the possibilities of tuning between technology and nature, control and chance, sensation and time. The audience does not simply hear sounds but witnesses the process of sound’s becoming. Listening becomes less an act of reception and more an event of life’s gift. Through the quiet but inevitable disappearance of material, Consonance asks what it means to be alive. This question extends beyond life itself to a critical reflection on how we live with technology, and how our very ways of sensing are shaped within it.