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Art

Sound Art

Involuntary Ghosts (Performance, 2026)

involuntary_ghosts (Credit: James Tuite, 2026)

Habitat loss and rapid urbanization in Beijing are actively reshaping the landscape for native bird populations. Involuntary Ghosts is a 20-minute, four-channel spatial audio performance that imagines birds in this changing environment singing for their lost kin. The piece uses a real-time simulation of interacting native bird species, with vocalizations that are manipulated to hover between recognizable birdsong and spectral textures. The simulation places a virtual voice on each branch of an imagined ghost tree, calling out to one another across the room.

Appearances:

Alaka'i 1777 (Installation/Performance, 2025)

alakai (Credit: Isaiah Winters, 2025)

Alakaʻi 1777 is an immersive audiovisual installation that reconstructs the lost song culture of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, an extinct Hawaiian bird once native to the Alakaʻi swamp. The work is inspired by a simple premise—when populations collapse, so do their learned traditions and vocal cultures that have built up over generations. In Alakaʻi 1777, interacting artificial agents sing from a mathematical model of the avian vocal organ (the syrinx), trained on the few surviving recordings of the species. These voices are nestled within site-specific ecological data from the ʻōʻō’s last known habitat: LiDAR scans of the forest, spatial audio recordings of the dawn chorus, and urbanization histories rendered as sound and image. To give listeners a deeper sense of this lost world, the entire soundscape is slowed down, allowing them to experience the songs as the original inhabitants of Alakaʻi may have perceived them. Within this expanded space, artificial agents act as spectral ancestors, engaging in a dynamic, multi-layered dialogue with real Kauaʻi ʻōʻō recordings, offering a glimpse into a richer, more intricate soundscape that vanished long before the last bird fell silent.

Appearances:

Made possible by the Augustine Foundation, Cultural Evolution Society, the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, Cornell's Macaulay Library, and NEW INC.

Deep Listening for Nonhuman Perspective-Taking (Workshop, 2024)

alakai

Deep Listening for Nonhuman Perspective-Taking is a participatory, immersive sound workshop where we listen deeply to diverse sounds of nonhuman life—infrasonic booms of whales, drumming displays of spiders, and complex songs of endangered and extinct birds. Every species experiences the world through its own umwelt, a distinct sensory reality that shapes how they communicate and express themselves. We explore each soundscape together, first hearing it as we do, then as the animals themselves might. I provide key context for each species—how they perceive the world, why they communicate—and invite participants to adopt their umwelt while listening to them communicate. As species disappear, so do their voices and cultures. Together, we reflect on this loss and what it means to empathize with the more-than-human world in an age of mass extinction.

Workshops:

Made possible by the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.

Visual Art

Below is a small sample of the visual art I have made since 2016, mostly for event promo. My other works are on my Instagram and available for sale as NFTs in my OpenSea collection.

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