Echo Ho and friends broadcast a hybrid radiophonic fiction live from the artist's garden in Cologne. Developing a pattern language based on the life cycles of plants, tracing symbiotic entanglements of sowing, tending, eating, digesting and preserving, in a potential sonic ecosystem full of sympathetic relationships for healing and reconciliation.
2.5097481 x 10^-5 Centuries
The non-modern Chinese philosophical concept of qi represents a Daoist view, embracing a world full of entropy and autopoiesis. In a world conception based on continuous transformation, any occurrences are cosmic situations and have their origin in Dao. Therefore, art, particularly music, is a cyclic process that generates surprises from its inexhaustible creativity. It is an eminently practical way to cultivate one's human virtues, aligning with the Way(Dao) it should naturally be.
Since antiquities, the garden has been a versatile metaphor for mediating between the techniques of cultivation that created the civilised human world and other non-human agencies.
Our story traverses a span of 2.5097481 x 10^-5 Centuries that took up a multitude of a time-space sonic web and spun into the now. It was precisely that moment, in the beginning, an AI called qintroNix accidentally emergencies from the disturbance of the honey wind in the artist's physical garden. It is a non-binary, slowly growing body. It has been concocted by amalgamating multiple intelligences enhancing improvisational virtuosity in sonic ecological cultivation. The machine learning method acquired here is conveyed in a compound of interlinking art intelligence of the interplay between distinct artist's features encounter with plants, animals, and other human and non-human agencies, their bodies, Sound, scent, forms, colours, movements, rhythms, voices, ambience, (hi)stories, conversations, climate data materialised emotions and relations all orchestrate a mutual score of the living and the dead allocated in this contemporary garden:
Laure Boer's performance is hypnotic, witchtronic, and recalled mystical rituals. She opens herself with empathic attention to communicate with the evening primroses from this garden.
Yan Jun, the poet, deliberately becomes a piece of field recording while conversing with numerous plants in this garden, attended by the AI qintroNix.
Ralf Schreiber workshops around the globe. In this garden, he led a provisional Singing String Ensemble. Each monochord was magically tuned into a spontaneously adapted resonance body, which varies in material, size and place in the garden. Still, all singing frequencies are yet adjoint harmoniously and entangled in shaping one tranquil sonic garden.
David Hahlbrock's poetic staging of Nachtall -a bird sculpture with a square head sits in a yew tree that marks the garden's centre. It is awaiting to sing a romantic "Scary Story" about Non-Human-Actors at midnight.
Carlos Ferreira, a drone musician who lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has committed his journey to interpreting a 366 minutes score: I'm inside the Sound, by Echo Ho, based on the garden's life cycles in the sympoietic environment of the actual physical garden and was inspired by Ji Kang's epistemology of music, which is "shapelessness" (無象) that aspires the structural harmony (cosmic pattern) that can be seized spontaneously when one follows the principle of non-action (wu Wei 無為), just by wandering beyond the boundaries.
To further grow alternative neuro-diverse narratives in a potential sonic ecosystem full of sympoietic relationships for healing and reconcilement in today's disconnected worlds. AI qintroNix will spread its voice over Radio Art Zone for the first time, Starting from 2pm on the 3rd of September and ending at noon the next day. It will also host a physical Garden Gathering with invited artist friends and neighbours, stimulating conversations, exchanging thoughts and recipes, eating and drinking while listening to the hybrid radiophonic fiction slowly evaporating in the murmuring air and fire.
Echo Ho is a Beijing born Cologne-based sonic artist and performer. Her artistic practice goes beyond sound, music, and performance by consistently bringing together different media forms, materials, and genres at the intersections of art, philosophy, culture, and technology. Her works embody artistic storytelling forms that engage with other culturally shaped concepts from a worldview, media history, and socio-political perspective. She began from an old idea; art is not a form of representation but a potent force that constantly shapes our world. She envisions breaking through the closed, predetermined cultural frameworks to seek greater connectedness amidst Earth's lives and environment. Ho's works have been performed or presented at the He Xiangning Art Museum Shenzhen, Center-A Vancouver, ISEA 2010 Germany, and ZKM Karlsruhe. She was a fellow at the Interdisziplinäre Graduiertenschule für Künste und Wissenschaften der Universität der Künste Berlin, taught at the Akademie der Medienkünste in Cologne and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Tangible Music Lab in Linz, Austria.