The Cube

An Audiovisual Interactive Installation

Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast

Funded by CETL Northern Ireland, and supported by the Queen’s University of Belfast.

The Cube is an interactive audiovisual installation that explores how a physical object can become a passage into unstable sonic and visual worlds. At its center is a small handheld cube, an object that appears simple but functions as a symbolic and performative key. Through gesture, rotation, and movement, the participant enters six distinct audiovisual territories, each shaped by different moods, sonic behaviors, and visual atmospheres. The cube becomes both an instrument and a navigational device, shifting the role of the audience from observer to performer.

Artistically, the project is concerned with the tension between control and uncertainty. Each interaction suggests agency, yet the system responds through complex audiovisual transformations that cannot be fully predicted. This creates a situation in which the participant does not master the environment, but negotiates with it. The work becomes a form of embodied exploration, where sound, image, and spatial movement unfold through curiosity, hesitation, and discovery.

The installation draws from the language of games and interactive performance, but resists the logic of fixed goals or winning. Its “stages” are not levels to be conquered, but experiential zones to be opened, inhabited, and interpreted. In this sense, The Cube uses gaming structure as an artistic method for organizing attention, encouraging participants to read the environment through movement, sensory feedback, and spatial transformation.

A secondary layer extends the work beyond the main chamber, allowing visitors in the foyer to contribute through mobile devices, messages, sounds, and images. This expands the installation into a shared social field, where participation is not limited to one performer but distributed across a wider audience. The project therefore treats interaction not only as control, but as communication, exchange, and collective presence.

The Cube proposes the artwork as a living audiovisual organism: a system that breathes through interaction, changes through gesture, and becomes meaningful only when activated by human presence. Its artistic value lies in transforming technology into an experiential architecture of play, perception, and spatial imagination.

The project was developed inside the unique 48-channel sound diffusion system of the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, with a commission and support from CETL Northern Ireland. It was also developed in the context of Johannes Birringer’s presence as artist-in-residence, situating the work within a wider environment of experimental performance, sonic research, and cross-disciplinary artistic production.

Conference publication here.