Signal Drift: Transmission, Ice and the Sonics of Movement
Diana Chester & Sean Minhui Tashi Chua
LYDGALERIET, Bergen, Norway, 05.09-26 2026
Chester and Chua spent one week on a residency at Lydgalleriet, Bergen’s sound gallery. The exhibition, Signal Drift, is a 4-movement spatial soundscape and sonification created from field recordings and movement data from the Arctic Circle. The work was designed and mixed for the galleries 8.4 custom sound system, and was presented on opening night with a live performance by Jonas Bakken on guitar.
Project Description:
A spatial sound installation that sonifies movement and communication across environmental and human systems. Data becomes sound in motion, unfolding through a 360° listening environment where audiences navigate shifting textures of ice, water, signal, and transmission.
Using field recording of polar environments and sonification to capture the texture and dynamics of environmental and infrastructural systems as sonic snapshots, this work sets data in motion through space. The movement of ice, water, vessels, signals, and communication unfolds as a spatial composition within a 360° listening environment, where texture, time, and transmission become audible. The spatial work will be paired with a live performance for the exhibition opening that is itself, part improvisation and part structured movement.
Structured as a form of three-dimensional storytelling, the installation guides listeners along shifting paths of movement. Distinct sonic environments emerge along the way: the fracture of ice, the flow and transformation of water, the presence of marine life, and the intermittent signals of human communication. Spatially distributed throughout the gallery, these moments are activated through proximity, inviting listeners to mix the work through their own movement and attention. In this way, listening becomes a form of navigation, where the composition is continuously shaped in motion.
Opening Night Performance by Jonas Bakken
Links
Performance Photos | Theatre Royal Hobart
ARTIST BIOS
Sean Minhui Tashi Chua
Sean Minhui Tashi Chua is a scientist and artist based in Nipaluna / Hobart creating research, tools and artworks that span the fields of earth science, data sonification and machine learning. Chua has implemented machine learning techniques for snow cover mapping in the Himalaya, taught a ‘Hearing Data’ workshop for Melbourne sound school and exhibited audio-visual works on drought affected landscapes at Adspace gallery. DJing as ‘Big Data’ his performances often serve as an outlet to recontextualise his experiences of data and earth science in a playful yet challenging style.
Diana Chester
Diana Chester is a digital media artist, educator and researcher using sound to explore more-than-human dimensions of understanding existence in the time of the Anthropocene. Their work uses sound, animation, and photography in conversation with ethnographic and archival materials, to convey ideas of pasts, presents, and futures. Driven by an intense desire to represence story and memory, Chester uses personal narratives as a method to voice to the world around them. To do so they fluidly explore multilingual, inter-environmental, and data generated soundscapes, finding rhythmic cadences and synergies from the natural world, and placing them in conversation with visual materials to compose “listening stories” that compel humans to think more deeply about inclusive ideas of place and belonging.
