#site-specific

Nature Unseen: A City’s Hidden Waves (2025)

This site-specific sound installation invited participants to move floor by floor through a building, from ground level to the fourth floor. As they walked, they experienced a synchronized audio composition embedded in the space and accessed poetic text through their mobile phones. Each level introduced distinct sonic textures shaped by the building’s unique acoustics, while visual cues encouraged the audience to explore the poetic potential of each floor. The text unfolded in twenty timed reflections, gently guiding perception, rhythm, and movement throughout the experience.

Concept: Lam Lai Sound composition and spatialisation: Lam Lai Visual cues, Coding, Wearable sound object design : Lam Lai 3D printing engineering: Gökay Atabek

Avalanches from Afar

In Avalanches from Afar, visual artist Serene Hui and composer Lam Lai present a hybrid work on the borderline between immersive installation and soundscape. Described as a ‘non-performance’, the piece is a 12-hour meditation on the subtle tension between speech and silence. Avalanches from Afar has its roots in a reflection on the limits of language and the disruption of direct communication. Drawing on literary references such as Jean-Dominique Bauby's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, personal stories and Jean-René Toussaint's ‘Stemwerk - Primitive Voice’ method, the two artists explore how words, sounds and silences weave together to create a unique space for sensory experience. The long duration encourages a total letting go, allowing the audience to connect deeply with the fragments of language, sounds and silences that make up the surrounding atmosphere.

Exploring the area around Vysoká. Curious about people's activity, their environment and the material culture that surrounds them leaves an imprint

I'm intrigued by Leoš Janáček's theory speech melody (nápěvky mluvy). He often collected the melody of people's speech in private and in public. He considered that these melodies were not only expressive of the meaning and emotion of the person speaking but also captured the time, place and the people surrounding the speaker. So they are like a seed that can expand under the right light to reveal a whole context. In these melodies, it's also plausible that histories are contained as traces from past places and times.

Since speech melodies are like seeds, the old farmyard fitted this analogy.

Tim Ingold proposed the idea of the taskscape to describe a process of leaving traces. Here place and landscape is made by the activities of people over a period of time and these structures can shape how new activities/technologies come into being. Worksongs can also emerge from those activities, creating a trace that outlasts their origins. Through exploring the farm, the fields, the village and the reserve nearby and connecting with the wildlife, I collected impressions as well as finding objects to form a framework for an installation.