sonic climates (2024)

Sonic Climates is an installation that explores the relationships between plants, sound, and human presence within a shared ecological system. Inspired by the florariums of Péter Teller, the project approaches plants not as decorative or symbolic elements, but as active, sensing entities embedded in dynamic environmental processes. This work proposes a shift from anthropocentric authorship toward a more-than-human assemblage in which agency is distributed across living organisms, technological interfaces, and human listeners.

Electrical micro-variations generated by the plants’ living tissues are captured and translated into parameters for sound synthesis. Rather than functioning as representational data, these signals act as relational triggers, shaping a continuously evolving sonic environment. As the plants respond to changes in light, humidity, temperature, and proximity, the soundscape slowly transforms — pulsing, drifting, and recalibrating over time. Sound here functions as a form of environmental feedback, revealing otherwise imperceptible rhythms of vegetal life and ecological interdependence.

Within this sonic climate, Khrystyna Kirik and Elod Máté Janky engage through live electroacoustic improvisation. Their role is not to control or dominate the system, but to practice attentive listening and situated response. The performance unfolds as a process of mutual adaptation, where human gestures are shaped by the sonic behavior of the plants, and vice versa. This approach aligns with practices of deep listening and improvisation as forms of ethical attention — foregrounding responsiveness, restraint, and co-presence.

Sonic Climates reflects on notions of time, solitude, and proximity in an era of environmental instability. By slowing down perception and amplifying subtle biological processes, the work invites the audience into a shared temporal space where human and non-human lives coexist and influence one another. The installation becomes a site of quiet negotiation, an intimate ecology of sound, encouraging an awareness of how presence, care, and listening might be reimagined beyond the human alone.

Sonic Climates was presented at the UH Festival 2024 in Budapest.