Harvestworks Art and Technology Program presents Cacophilharmonie AM-1in Spring Steel Dorian DS 1095, A mechanical orchestra where metal sheets seem to breathe and speak. Their natural resonance is amplified and allowed to unfold, revealing the inner life of the material. Vibrations ripple between objects, giving form to a network of sounds that feels alive, a reflection on presence, being, and the music hidden within matter.
DATES AND TIMES: Installation 11 AM – 5 PM, August 16-17 & 23-24, 2025
LOCATION: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
FREE
Accompanying this piece, from 3-4 PM on August 17th, N/A(Z) will be performing a live experimental electronic set.
This kinetic sound installation brings metal sheets to life through a chain reaction of vibration and movement. Contact microphones pick up each sheet’s unique resonance and feed it forward, driving the next motor in the loop. It’s a bit like they’re listening to themselves and then answering back, passing a sonic impulse along. In this space, every object gets to speak in its own voice, shaped not by the artists’ will alone, but by its own weight, texture, and form. Rather than composing a fixed score, the work sets up a living system, where sound is something that emerges, shifts, and sometimes surprises even the maker.
There’s an echo here of artists like Zimoun, whose minimal motor-driven constructions let materials reveal their own character. But this piece leans toward something more existential, toward what Heidegger called Dasein: the idea of “being there,” of existing in a particular place and time, with awareness. The metal sheets are not just instruments; they are presences. Each moment they vibrate, they announce themselves as here, now, part of a network where control and chance constantly trade places. In the end, it becomes less about the machine and more about the conversation between objects, between moments, between what we build and what the world gives back.
Accompanying this piece, from 3-4 PM on August 17th, N/A(Z) will be performing a live experimental electronic set with Ableton Push and Ableton Live. Her set is composed of field recordings, live sound manipulations, experimental sound design, and live improvisational Turkish singing.
- BIO Dolunay Solmaz
Dolunay Solmaz is an Istanbul-based sonic artist and electronics engineer, focusing on sonic illusions, interactive systems, and networked music. Her work centers on the ideas of experimentation, chance, and acts of intervention. Driven by curiosity for what is unseen and unheard, she explores sound as a presence that quietly shapes and responds to its surroundings.
Website: https://dolunay-solmaz.carbonmade.com/
- BIO Mirko Gerber
Mirko Gerber works in the fractures between matter and signal, building sculptures and sonic systems that ask what remains of us as life drifts into the digital. Trained in Image and Media Studies and forged in Paris’s fashion circuits as a 3D artist and filmmaker, he abandoned the machinery of manufactured desire to chase a practice stitched from ethics, critical research, and sensory intensity. His current work dissects biophilia, consciousness, and the architectures of virtual space, hunting for forms that resist the gravity of capitalist time and reconnect the body to its own inner weather.
Website: https://mirkogerber.com/
- BIO N/A(Z)
N/A(Z) is multidisciplinary shapeshifter investigating the layers of reality, world building, and simulations through the potential of sound, video, and performance. Her work explores perception, alternative realities, relations, and vulnerability through technology. As a musician, she composes, sound designs, produces, performs live, and does Turkish vocal improvisations; as a visual artist, she creates digital art, abstract videos, projections, installations, and text-based art. Her work has been guided by philosophy, ontology, metaphysics, feminism, hybrid human-machine relationships, deep listening, traditional Turkish singing, mindfulness, and lucid dreaming.
Instagram: @duality.live