An interactive audiovisual installation that reveals how data infrastructure reorganises ecology, territory, and memory in Guizhou, translating the hidden costs of digital expansion into a spatial experience of listening, sensing, and critical reflection.
Define the problem/need you are solving or addressing with your project. How does it address the Open Call criteria, such as environmental impact, social engagement, circularity, user experience, resource efficiency, and community-driven solutions?
Cloud of Polyphony addresses a problem that shapes everyday life yet often remains invisible: the ecological and territorial cost of digital infrastructure. Data centres, 5G networks, and platform expansion are presented as progress, while their energy demands, land use, and environmental consequences stay out of view. This matters directly to young people because digital systems organise how they communicate, study, work, and build social life. The project responds by creating an interactive installation that makes those hidden conditions perceptible through sound, image, and spatial experience. By connecting platform growth in Guizhou to local ecologies and social histories, the work invites critical reflection on technological dependence, environmental responsibility, and what a more just digital future could require.
Please describe your project, reflecting on the concept, inspiration, materials, technical aspects, methods and process(es).
The project combines sound installation, moving image, reclaimed construction materials, and sensor-based interaction. It begins from field research in Guizhou, a region reshaped by data infrastructure and digital industrial policy. I work with field recordings, synthesised audio textures, oral histories, and visual references drawn from 5G towers, abandoned expo sites, and altered landscapes. These elements are assembled into an immersive environment built from reused plywood and truss structures. Sensors register audience movement and modulate the sonic composition, so listening becomes a situated encounter rather than passive reception. The method joins spatial research, audiovisual montage, material reuse, and installation testing to translate complex infrastructural processes into an embodied, legible, and critically charged experience.
What do you think makes your project innovative compared to the existing efforts and ideas in the field it addresses?
The project is innovative because it treats data infrastructure as a spatial, sensory, and political condition rather than a neutral technical background. Instead of offering a product fix, it creates a public interface for understanding how digital expansion reorganises land, labour, energy, and perception. Its environmental contribution lies in exposing the ecological costs of supposedly immaterial systems and reusing materials in the installation itself. Its social value lies in connecting local histories, oral narratives, and collective listening to wider questions of technological governance. Its user experience is immersive yet reflective, using sound and movement to build awareness rather than spectacle. In this way, Cloud of Polyphony aligns with the call’s interest in ethical technology, cultural shift, and humane futures.
Does it impact or reflect young people need(s) and how?
Yes. The project reflects young people’s conditions because digital infrastructure shapes how they study, work, communicate, and imagine the future. Cloud of Polyphony addresses the gap between everyday digital dependence and the hidden systems that sustain it: data centres, network expansion, energy extraction, and territorial transformation. Young people inherit these infrastructures as both users and future decision-makers, while they also face the environmental and social consequences they produce. The installation creates an embodied way to sense those conditions through sound, image, and spatial interaction. It invites younger audiences to understand digital technology as a material and political system rather than a seamless service. This shift in perception matters because it supports critical awareness, ecological responsibility, and a more active position toward the technological futures they are expected to live within.
