Like a meditative walk, Echoes of Silence offers a contemplative experience of disturbances that, though imperceptible, shape our environment. Both artworks and instruments, Chang Yung-Ta’s installations use technology to transform data from natural phenomena into sound compositions.
The exhibition marks a key moment in the artist’s trajectory, offering a perspective on a practice inherently shaped by randomness and accident. By embracing entropy as a mode of composition, Chang Yung-Ta invites us to reflect on the invisible and on the use of technology as both a tool for knowledge and a means of creation.
Chang Yung-Ta invites us to perceive imperceptible disturbances: a vibration, a wave spreading, a signal buried in the noise of the world… In this universe of waves and frequencies, silence is never absolute. It is crossed by wandering particles, inhabited, vibrant. It resonates.
Usually analyzed in scientific laboratories, here data are reinterpreted by generative algorithms that translate the randomness of radiation into sound compositions, transform the flow of a river into artificial landscapes, or turn visitors’ breaths into ephemeral clouds. Thus, it is no surprise to find elements such as Geiger-Müller counters or hydrochloric acid among the listed materials. Both artworks and instruments, Chang Yung-Ta’s installations draw from technology and scientific equipment to reveal what usually escapes us: the pulsations of chance, the whispers of radiation, the silhouette of sound.
While in residence in Japan during the Fukushima nuclear accident, Chang Yung-Ta developed a fascination for these invisible particles that follow neither a stable rhythm nor a predictable order. Most often harmless, they are omnipresent, originating as much from the Earth’s crust as from a much more distant source: the cosmos. Radioactive waves thus become the artist’s privileged collaborators. Acting as a new kind of maestro, they are captured and translated into soundscapes, setting the rhythm and triggering vibrations.
What we call silence is, in truth, a secret weave: a web of flows and resonances. Echoes of Silence are these subtle traces that hint at what lies beneath the surface of perception. By unveiling them, Chang Yung-Ta invites us to a new form of listening—an experience where the infinitely small dictates the rhythm of the sensitive.
