Soojin Chang | Works Portfolio
Metabolic Architectures
This portfolio showcases selected works that integrate performance, installation, and spatialized research to explore how violence, transformation, and planetary intelligence are metabolized through and within digital, sonic, and bodily architectures. My practice merges electroacoustic setups, bioacoustics, and multispecies intelligence to activate space as a dynamic, metabolizing entity—where planetary trauma, historical resonance, and machine-learning processes generate shifting fields of interaction.
My recent work investigates how spatialized environments—whether bodily, digital, or planetary—can metabolize violence, revealing hidden structures of power, transformation, and interspecies entanglement. Through immersive sound design, ritual-based interventions, and machine-learning processes, my installations explore how architectural, sonic, and biological systems can function as active sites of metabolization rather than passive containers of experience.
My approach is rooted in liveness and transformation, treating the body, space, and planetary systems as interwoven forces that shift and reconfigure in real time. Through this residency, I aim to develop new methodologies for spatialized metabolization—where bodily presence, planetary data, and machine intelligence converge to create dynamic, responsive architectures.
Works
For years, my practice has explored non-duality—dissolving boundaries between human and nonhuman, body and planet, subject and object. Through performance and film, the body has been a site of metabolization—absorbing violence, history, and multispecies intelligence.
Now, this inquiry extends into immersive architectures—not only performing within spaces, but creating them as living, metabolic forces. These environments do not simply represent or contain experience; they enact transformation. Sound, planetary violence, and multispecies intelligence converge in real time—where space itself breathes, absorbs, and transmits.
Eternal Now, 2024. Participatory Sonic Ritual
A durational performance where reality is absorbed, rendered fluid, and transmuted through sound, breath, and collective ritual. The work unfolds as a threshold—where time, memory, and vibrational transmission continuously metabolize and reconfigure.
At the center of the work, my body embodied the Eternal Now—a conduit through which inherited histories collapsed and were reconstituted through live ritual. Audiences became active participants, offering gestures of washing, meditating, chanting, and humming—each action dissolving and activating what had been carried forward.
The soundscape was composed of morphic resonance frequencies—vibrational architectures that encode energetic memory and collapse the historical into the present. Alongside this, longtime collaborator Kasimyn’s BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL processed Indonesia’s war archives, colonial ghosts, and systemic sacrifice, creating a sonic field where temporal boundaries dissolved into a space of continuous becoming.
Collaborators:
- M. Elizabeth Scott: poet and esotericist.
- Romane Courdacher: a multidisciplinary artist who combines sculpture, physical installations, and virtual spaces
Venue and Series:
- HYPA-PHIXED at in vitro: Eternal Now was developed for the HYPA-PHIXED group show, part of the in vitro series curated by Kiik Amor at Enclave Projects. enclaveprojects.uk
Press Reception:
- O FLUXO
- saliva.live: AI-powered art platform focused on nature and technology symbiosis within the self-centered universe.
BXBY, 2022 at Jerwood Space.
BXBY is a hybrid film and live performance project exploring reproductive technologies, multispecies consciousness, and the metabolization of planetary forces within and through the body. Developed as a year-long durational performance, BXBY interrogates the porous boundaries between human and nonhuman reproduction, governance, and transformation, situating the artist’s own body as a site of radical spatialization—where the biological, technological, and planetary merge.
The work unfolds across multiple temporal and spatial dimensions—drawing from the state-sanctioned deer culls in Ardnamurchan, where violence, conservation, and sovereignty collapse into a single metabolizing act. BXBY unfolds as a process of spatial and temporal metabolization, where the body becomes a vessel for planetary intelligence, absorbing and reconfiguring deep-time histories through movement, ritual, and interspecies interaction.
Rather than treating the body as a fixed entity, BXBY transforms it into a spatial conduit—a structure through which cosmological forces, reproductive governance, and nonhuman agencies are processed. The performance extends beyond the physical into a spatialized sonic environment, where frequency, resonance, and vibrational memory alter perceptual space.
BXBY is a study in spatial metabolization—how planetary forces, multispecies histories, and cosmic transmissions unfold through the body-as-space. The work contributes to an evolving inquiry into how digital and physical architectures might function as metabolic thresholds, where transformation is not represented but enacted in real time.
Screenings & Live Performances:
- Barbican Centre, London (Queer East Film Festival, 2023) + live Q&A: Queer East BXBY
- Jerwood Space, London (2022) + live performance event: BXBY at Jerwood at BXBY Live at Forma
- CAVE, Leeds (2022): CAVE BXBY
Research & Collaborations:
- Worked with scientists & scholars:
- Dr. Lotte Strøbech (veterinarian, IVF specialist)
- Dr. Lucy van de Wiel (author of Freezing Fertility)
- Dr. Undine Sellbach (multispecies philosopher and theorist)
- Dr. Lynn Turner (philosopher in sex, gender, species)
- Kodwo Eshun (sonic & speculative futures)
Public Talks & Lectures:
- University of Leeds (2022)
- Goldsmiths, University of London (2022)
Press & Writing:
- Why Should Our Bodies End With Our Skin? by Undine Sellbach (commissioned essay for BXBY): Read here
- Featured in Ocula, CLOT Magazine, and more.
Credits & Institutional Support:
- Full collaborator & institutional credits: View PDF
For more information on BXBY, see the FVU page.
Performance still from a heifer would be needed for the sacrifice (2021) at Tramway for Take Me Somewhere 2021. A live performance that enacts a biotechnical ritual of multispecies surrogacy. Through algorithmically generated sonic effects, invocations, and bodily experimentation, this work immerses the audience in a non-dualistic experience, dissolving the boundaries between human and nonhuman channels of communication.
Installations & Spatial Process
These works mark the transition from body-based immersion to spatialised experience. While my performances enacted metabolisation through the body, my installations begin to extend these processes outward—into sculptural, sonic, and architectural environments. Here, the body is no longer the sole site of transformation. Instead, materials, objects, and sound structures become active forces—absorbing and metabolising histories, violence, and planetary signals. These installations lay the groundwork for my current practice, where space is no longer passive—it is an intelligent, metabolic entity. Just as revelation is not an object but a force, these installations do not contain experience—they are revelations of thresholds—architectures of becoming, dissolution, and emergence. At their core, these works function as metabolic instantiations of planetary intelligence—not representations, but living enactments of transformation, where space metabolises violence, memory, and consciousness in real time.
Sacrifice to the Seaworm, 2022. Leeds Art Gallery
This work emerged as a material invocation following the censorship of BXBY. The installation repurposes ritual objects, biological materials, and gestural traces, forming an offering to the seaworm—an entity of dissolution and deep time. In many cosmologies, the seaworm appears as a figure of transformation: it metabolises bodies, histories, and forgotten worlds, breaking them down into new ecologies.
This work enacts that process: where a censored body would have stood, material and ritual structures remain, absorbing and transmuting presence in its absence.
Sacrifice to the Seaworm is both an offering and a question—what remains when a work is forbidden? What emerges when a body dissolves into material memory?
DOG EGGS, developed during the Creators_R Residency at the Asia Culture Center (ACC), South Korea, is a sculptural, cinematic, and sonic exploration of nonhuman-human surrogacy, where planetary metabolization unfolds through gestation, dissolution, and transmutation. The work interrogates biotechnical rituals, necromantic traditions, and multispecies surrogacy within a hybrid installation—drawing from the pet trade, the dog meat industry, and Korean spirit-channeling practices, where women act as vessels for the dead. These forces converge within a gestational ecosystem, where synthetic bodies and organic remains dissolve into an alchemical residue of new possibilities.
At the center of the installation, a former rental sex doll, sourced from an underground business in Gwangju, becomes a charged site of alchemical transition—absorbing new configurations of intimacy, extraction, and surrogacy across human, animal, and spectral realms. Around her, small black puppies—suspended between gestation and decomposition—undergo enzymatic degradation, dissolving into residue. The metabolic system, stimulated by bioremediation enzymes, activates decomposition as a process of transformation rather than disappearance.
Within this space, sound operates as a necromantic and vibrational force of transmission—encoding the sculpture with planetary frequencies, ancestral voices, and multispecies consciousness. Sound, rather than serving as an atmospheric layer, is a site of metabolization itself—where vibrational remnants, echoes of historical violence, and spectral presences coalesce.
DOG EGGS engages destruction not as negation but as metabolization—a process that shifts, absorbs, and reconfigures through biological, technological, and sonic architectures. The work frames preservation not as stasis, but as an ongoing state of transformation, where life, power, and interspecies intimacy are continuously reconfigured.
Relevance to Residency Research: This project aligns with Laboratoire Modulaire's focus on digital environments, spatialization, and new forms of sensitive interaction by investigating how sonic metabolization can function as a transformative force within digital and AI-driven architectures. By developing an AI-processed soundscape that responds to material transformation, DOG EGGS contributes to research on how digital spaces metabolize planetary violence and multispecies intelligence through sound and AI processing.
Research & Sound
Sound is a site of metabolization—a medium through which planetary violence, nonhuman intelligence, and deep-time resonance are transformed into interactive sonic architectures. My work engages bioacoustic research, machine-learning sound modulations, and seismic listening to explore how digital and spatial environments metabolize violence through sound processing.
This research takes multiple forms: from documenting state-sanctioned deer culls as sonic landscapes of biopolitical control, to capturing the vibrational infrastructures of abandoned settlements, wind energy, and geological forces on the Isle of Eigg. Through bioacoustics, live sound modulation, and algorithmic processing, I investigate how AI-driven soundscapes can act as metabolizing forces within digital, spatial, and planetary environments.
In Ardnamurchan, my research into state-sanctioned culls engaged directly with sound as a mechanism of sovereignty and sacrifice—where bioacoustic signals, machine-learning modulation, and planetary frequencies shape the sonic architectures of extraction and governance.
In my latest experiments, I am exploring how AI-generated sound can interact dynamically with movement, presence, and multispecies intelligence—shaping responsive sonic systems that shift in real time.
A documentary investigation into the ethics of planetary violence, focusing on state-sanctioned deer culls in the Scottish Highlands. This research examines the complex interplay between wildlife management practices, national and international conservation goals, and ecological ethics, contributing to a broader understanding of multispecies coexistence.
Bothy Residency
Collaborative bioacoustic research conducted during the Bothy Residency with Samuel Karugu, exploring nonhuman collaboration through vibration, resonance, and elemental sound modulation. Using a sensitive omnidirectional geophone originally designed for seismic measurement—we captured subterranean and structural vibrations across the remote, community-owned, and entirely sustainable Isle of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides.
We worked with the wind turbines of Eigg’s renewable energy infrastructure, connecting their vibrations to a portable electronic setup, intuitively playing with their frequencies through domestic kitchen tools, pedals, synths, and drum machines. This opened channels of hearing, channeling, and collaboration with the element of air/sky/ether as it is transformed into power.
We extended this process into the ground—embedding the Geofón in Upper Grulin, an abandoned township built within Iron Age settlements, capturing earthbound resonances while I lay with my heart connected to the soil. In Massacre Cave, a site of violent historical trauma, we recorded seismic traces of memory embedded within stone and air.
These sonic processes were not simply recordings but acts of attunement—an engagement with elemental and historical intelligences, where acoustic randomness and infinite sonic modulations shaped our collaboration with the nonhuman world.