Sabina Hyoju Ahn: Transformative Art and Research

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PlaSphere

PlaSphere is a sound installation with integrated visual elements that examines the Anthropocene through environmental change and the fusion of natural and human-made materials. Plastiglomerates—geological formations where plastic, rock, and organic matter fuse under heat and pressure along coastal environments—serve as both subject and method: the installation builds its sounds and images the same way the beach builds its stones.

Drawing from field recordings on remote islands and coastal regions of South Korea (Neural Tides, 2024), the project constructs a sonic environment through granular re-synthesis and spectral processing. Nine hours of recordings are broken into categories—natural, industrial, organic, mechanical—and triggered at variable intervals, sometimes raw, sometimes transformed. Each sound's frequency spectrum is broken apart and scattered across 18 channels, so fragments from different sources accumulate at any point in the room. The result is a landscape of hybrid sounds, each one a conglomeration of natural and artificial fragments fused together like the plastiglomerates found on those same beaches.

The visual layer consists of speculative lifeforms whose bodies are part plastiglomerate, part living organism, displayed as holograms in wooden boxes. These hybrid forms were created using a custom LoRA trained on hundreds of photographs of real plastiglomerates collected on-site, generating forms that blend geological textures with the anatomy of animal species native to the islands. Video models animate the still images, giving the creatures movement and life.

This iteration of the project is an ongoing collaboration under collective_nshp (Sabina Hyoju Ahn, Seyeon Park, and Ryan Millett).
This project is supported by Art Lab Korea, and Peter Brill Foundation.