Mikael Hwang

Consonance aims to move beyond narratives of technological exceptionalism to envision a more entangled relationship between technology and nature, inviting audiences to become participants in this coexistent interplay. Rather than privileging one element over another, Consonance explores how light and sound can co-produce new sensory experiences and, by extension, becomes a metaphor for the consonance—and sometimes tension—between technological innovation and natural processes. The use of a biodegradable LP record foregrounds this entanglement, presenting material decay not as failure but as a site for collaboration.

Central to the project is a musical device that unites two sonic elements: one produced by a fully biodegradable LP record, the other generated from the shifting interaction of light shining through the record as it biologically degrades. Through this process, audiences are invited to experience time from a nonhuman perspective through the harmonic output of the LP and its progressive dissolution, foregrounding bacterial agencies as they assert their own rhythms and logics. The resulting "new music" becomes a physical metaphor for the unpredictable yet rebalancing, fragile points of equilibrium between technological intervention and nature.

The project comments on the impact of human activity on the planet, highlighting how technological solutions, often developed with optimism, can produce unforeseen and lasting consequences. For instance, in 1907, Leo Baekeland, the inventor of the world’s first plastic, optimistically claimed, “Unless I am very much mistaken, this invention will prove important to the future.” Initially developed as an environmental solution (to create an ivory substitute and reduce the deforestation caused by the paper demands of the 20th century), plastic has, only a century later, become a crisis of unparalleled scope and complexity.

Through these layered interventions, Consonance engages, not just between technology and environment, but among competing agencies, timescales, and materialities, prompting us to reconsider whose timelines, agencies, and equilibria shape the world we inhabit. Ultimately, the work asks how we might learn from these entanglements, moving toward more thoughtful and integrated approaches, where human innovation is in conversation, rather than in competition, with the natural world.