Consonance

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 considers how technological solutions conceived with optimism can produce unforeseen, lasting consequences. This tension runs through the history of plastic, from celluloid’s promise as an alternative to ivory to Baekeland’s invention of Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, in 1907. As plastics became indispensable, the durability that made them useful also created a legacy of persistent waste. Consonance brings that history into the act of listening, as bacteria gradually undo the material carrying the music.

Through these layered interventions, Consonance examines relations between technology and the environment, and 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.