Mikael Hwang

Resonance (2023) examines the evolving interactions between humans and non-human entities. It shifts the perspective to view these entities as co-creators rather than tools, seeking to explore the intelligence of multi-agency collaboration between artists and non-human artists toward delineated roles, symbiosis, and connected realities.

The project manifests as a pavilion that integrates space, light, sound, and biology, showcasing how, even within our collaborative framework, we as individuals collaborate with our respective non-human entities: generative design AI and bacteria.

The pavilion functions as both a physical space and a conceptual medium, speculating on the development and further dissection of architectural space (volumes, lines, to now, points) to allow granular control and, thus, a wider scope of artistic expression. Resonance demonstrates this through its use of scaffolding structures, which embody the basic functionality of traditional joints. While limited in detailed expression, these elements motivate collaboration with generative design. This approach uses thousands of simulations to refine designs, leveraging temporality inaccessible to humans (compressed evolution) to develop a new joint system, serving as a case study to discuss multi-agency collaboration while reimagining the design of space to unprecedented levels of architectural detail and expression.

Within the pavilion, a parallel multi-agency collaboration takes place. Featuring the world’s first “living” drum, bacteria in a liquid incubator digest a biodegradable net. Upon degradation, trapped balls are released, rising to strike a glass membrane, creating sound and simultaneously controlling the pavilion’s lighting. This micro-performativity not only challenges anthropocentric views of music but also highlights plastic biodegradation as an “evolved intelligence” to collaboratively face an anthropogenic ecological crisis.