PHONO KINETIC

Sound artist, composer, and performer Bora Yoon premieres her newest work PHONO KINETIC (formerly SPKR SPRKL) for spatial audio, interactive projections, and gestural, digital, and acoustic instruments. PHONO KINETIC is a one-woman performance and z-space poem tracing the journey of a carbon atom, articulating the many cycles, scales and recombinant alchemical forms life takes; a contemplation of time, within sonic and spatial environments and dreams visualized in an enveloping theatrical landscape.

As a multi-instrumentalist and established electronic musician, Yoon performs signature soundscapes, made up of spoken stories, hauntingly beautiful soprano vocals, synthesized music, found sounds, and unusual acoustic instruments. In PHONO KINETIC, Yoon gestures using superDraw, a custom software instrument created by visualist Joshue Ott, paired with the hardware of Imogen Heap’s Mi.Mu gloves. A powerful tool, superDraw responds to Yoon’s on-stage movements, establishing graphic digital and architectural set design and dramatic visuals in real time, animating Yoon’s temporal, sonic, and spatial compositions.

With various configurations of holographic, multi-channel audio utilizing EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, PHONO KINETIC conjures worlds of sound through auditory dream language, shadows, and kinetic manipulation. Multimedia theatrical director Ashley Tata directs this part-electronic concert, part-sound-object theater event. Yoon premiered an excerpt of this new work, titled SPKR SPRKL at TIME:SPANS contemporary music festival in NYC, August 2021, where EMPAC presented newly commissioned musical works for the Wave Field Synthesis Array in a series of concerts.