Accidental Paradise
A second collaboration with Young In Hong, Accidental Paradise is my answer to her question, “can you make me speak with the voice of a red crowned crane?”
Using SP Tools (now Data Knot) in Max – a machine learning audio analysis tool kit – I created a collection of tiny crane sounds grouped together by their audio chracteristics. These sounds were then played by a system that analysed a recording of Young In speaking her text Durumi and I, and matched the sound of her voice to a corresponding snippet of crane recording in real time. The result was Young In’s text ‘spoken’ by a chorus of the birds. This was then set within a 4 channel surround audio environment made up of field recordings from the demilitarised zone between South and North Korea.
The resulting audio work was commissioned by and first shown at Art Sonje Center in Seoul from May - July 2025, and then shown at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre as part of Undo Planet Part 1 from October to November 2025.
Below is a short film of the Seoul install as well as a couple of photos, the first is from Seoul and the second from Bangkok. The Bankok photo is credited to BACC and the Seoul shot is by Young In. The final image is a representation of the corpus of crane sounds within an XY grid.