cube (2023)

Cube is an interactive, sensor-based sound installation and performance platform by Khrystyna Kirik and Nick Acorn, conceived as a micro-ecology of presence, movement, and participation. More than a container for sound, the Cube is a performative architecture: a flexible, permeable structure that frames embodied encounter and redistributes agency between bodies, materials, and signal systems.

Subtle sensors embedded in the Cube translate proximity, gesture, and motion into real-time control data for a four-channel spatial sound system. These mappings are not fixed commands but probabilistic affordances — thresholds and biases that invite emergent relationships rather than deterministic outcomes. The result is a responsive sonic field that reconfigures according to each visitor’s movement: textures bloom, grains shift, and spatial trajectories fold back on themselves, producing unique sonic events with every interaction.

The Cube draws on ideas from relational aesthetics (art as a site of social encounter), embodied cognition and enactive perception (knowledge enacted through movement), and theories of cybernetic feedback and emergence (systems that self-organize through interaction). Its permeable walls remove binary inside/outside divisions and encourage lateral entry and unplanned crossings, so the installation becomes a communal instrument — a shared score shaped through collective presence.

Cube was presented at the Brave! Factory Festival 2023 in Kyiv, where it engaged audiences in immersive participatory experiences.