In Resonance: Puck Wacki

Wacki’s practice explores how we perceive human-made systems and machines, particularly concepts such as time. By dissecting and reconfiguring machines, she investigates the structures that shape our lives and environments. Through sound and installation, she brings out the tension between the spiritual and the technological, revealing a poetic dimension and offering perspectives beyond the machine’s purely functional role.

We asked her to share some thoughts on her artistic practice, what inspires her, and what she is working on specifically for Conflux 2025.

Puck Wacki: “In Resonance is part of my ongoing research into how sound can be shaped and moved through time and space in a more material form. Over the past few years, my interest in and research on early electroacoustic music, experimental sound-making, and sound art has grown. The work and music of Alvin Lucier, Alan Lamb, Paul Panhuysen, and many others have inspired me. What interests me most about their work is how they allow the medium to speak for itself.

Central to In Resonance is a string instrument that generates the vibrations forming the basis of the installation’s sound. Fourteen steel strings, each six meters long, are individually set into motion by electromagnets rather than through traditional plucking or striking. These strings are not tightly tuned but left with some slack, allowing subtle physical variations—such as temperature shifts and slight movements—to continuously influence their resonance. The resulting vibrations are captured by magnetic pickups and converted into electronic signals.

These signals are then voiced through loudspeakers. I was interested in redefining the loudspeaker itself, not simply as a device to emit the sounds of the strings, but as a sculptural and spatial medium in its own right. By using speakers as standalone elements within the installation, I explored how their physical movement and positioning can alter the perception of sound in space. Each speaker projects sound toward a slowly rotating reflective plate, which constantly changes the angle of reflection. With multiple of these kinetic objects spread throughout the space, the angles at which sounds intersect and interact are always shifting, creating a dynamic and ever-evolving sonic environment. This opens up a wide field of possibilities and questions that I’m eager to explore further.”

Puck Wacki: “Sound in In Resonance is never static; it slowly erodes, distorts, and dissolves into space. The rotating plates send sound along ever-changing paths, causing some frequencies to fade while others surface. Sounds that were just audible gently recede without notice. This cyclical process of construction and deconstruction forms an acoustic ritual in which decay is not an end, but a phase of transformation. Overtones cluster densely before dissolving again, reflections shift as the sculptures turn, and what you just heard gradually vanishes into the room’s reverberation. This ongoing cycle mirrors the rhythm of ritual repetition: an ever-moving work that never assumes the same form twice.

I wanted to create an installation in which the audience’s own movement plays an active role in shaping what they hear and experience. I want them to be immersed in a sound field that is constantly in motion, not only audible, but also tangible as pressure, vibration, and resonance within the body. The experience is sensory, yet it carries an underlying message: our perception of sound is always temporary and bound to place. No two moments in the space are ever the same; what you hear is always the result of a unique convergence of location, time, and movement. The work invites wandering, listening from different positions, and experiencing how space itself becomes an active part of the composition.

Beneath this lies a broader reflection on technology, space, and impermanence: how sound, like matter, never stands still, but is always in the process of becoming something else. In this way, I continue to seek ways to blur the boundaries between instrument, space, and listener, and to make listening a spatial, physical, and temporal experience.”

In Resonance, along with other commissioned and non-commissioned works, can be seen at Katoenhuis from Thursday, September 18. 

For more information about Puck Wacki, visit her website, and her Instagram page.