Overheated State

Can we still imagine a city that is both cool and quiet?

Overheated State is not a cooling ritual. It is a sonic confrontation with the material conditions of heat. The work attempts to open the pores of the city, allowing the heat and sound suppressed within everyday life to surface.

How a City Overheats

Using contact microphones, low-frequency vibration recording and on-site field recordings, the work gathers sounds from air-conditioning compressors, underground ventilation systems, ground vibrations and the pulse of urban traffic.

These sounds remain continuously present, yet familiarity has pushed them into the background of perception. They are both the residual sounds of machinery and acoustic traces of how the city produces, transfers and releases heat. The heat does not disappear; it is displaced into streets, buildings and the spaces occupied by other bodies.

Through processing and amplification, these recordings cease to be incidental products of mechanical systems. They become the city’s primary rhythm—a body that vibrates, breathes and leaks, yet never fully cools.

Sensory Displacement

During the intervention, misting devices and the low-frequency soundscape are activated simultaneously. While the skin encounters the apparent coolness of water vapour, the ears remain immersed in the sounds of machinery, discharged heat and urban vibration.

As the skin and ears receive contradictory information, the coordinates of sensory reality begin to shift. Is the sensation of coolness genuine, or is it a temporary illusion produced by another energy-consuming system?

The work draws listeners into the inner layers of the city, revealing how it continues to overheat beneath the surface of ordinary life. We do not merely inhabit the city; we are surrounded and permeated by it, becoming part of both its operation and its cost.

Porous Mirage

Porous Mirage is a participatory sound workshop developed from Overheated State, situated at the intersection of sound, heat and artificial mist.

Combining low-frequency sound, contact microphones, guided breathing and immersive sound design, the workshop leads participants towards vibrations concealed beneath engines, cooling systems, ventilation ducts and asphalt. As the body becomes attuned to this mechanical field, a forest soundscape gradually enters through the mist, producing the sensory image of a natural environment that is not actually present.

Participants do not leave the city. Instead, they enter a forest-like mirage summoned through sound and climate technology. The skin feels coolness and the ears perceive a forest, while the body remains surrounded by an overheated city and the systems sustaining it.

The experience is not an escape. It intervenes in the structures of the city, habitual perception and the nature of heat itself. Before the mirage disappears, the work asks whether the ears and the body are speaking different languages.