Phonon
Yildiz Tufan and Luyang Zou
Phonon, named for the smallest unit of acoustic energy, is an audiovisual landscape that celebrates stillness and slowness. The installation encourages visitors to experience the environment in a more personal way, instead of consuming media voraciously to be forgotten with the next swipe. Phonon focuses on the creation of a memory through a moment in time that has been slowed to the edge of stillness.
Visual illusionary cues, projection mapping and spatial sound techniques enlarge the physical installation space to an immersive projection environment that represents an abstracted cityscape. A mat placed inside the physical space guides the participant to sit down and limit their movement. The installation is awakened only as the viewer sits, and each sitting point becomes a generative marker for the projected environment.
By switching from movement to stillness, an individual can form the space both visually and audially. The location of the user is memorised by the installation when he/she slows down and stays still. The visual and aural landscape shifts and adjusts to these positions of stillness, recomposing the memory of the space. If there is no change for a certain amount of time, the landscape will evolve by looping through the saved positions if previous users, waiting to be explored by another.
