seeing sounds / hearing time
seeing sounds / hearing time is a generative art piece dedicated to the late artist Ryuchi Sakamoto. Developed in p5.js, seeing sounds, hearing time is an immersive digital experience, challenging the norms of what we consider "zines." Viewers are guided through a sequence of scenes that visualize Sakamoto's latest album, async, an experimental auditory journey through time, decay, and death.
Visit seeing sounds, hearing time on browser.
Date
2025
Client
Student
Type
Generative Art
Web Design
About the Experience
Created to be a full body experience, but reconfigured as a web browser experience, Seeing Sounds, Hearing Time takes the viewer through various scenes depicting a gradual descend into decay. One such scene pulls inspiration directly from Stalker from Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, who Sakamoto cited as being his inspiration for the async album.
Fig 1. "Tree," the first scene of the experience in proper scaled in-person experience
The Zine
Fig 2. Generative Code is used to create the ASCII tree, which also spawned random characters over time. Tree looped over a scene of Stalkers. Song - walker
Fig 3. Song- tri
Fig 4. Song - ff
Fig 5. Song - Honji
Fig 6. LifeLife ending scene, featuring track fullmoon
Created specifically for a web experience, LifeLife invites the user to try and "erase" the words engulfing the screen, as narration from Paul Bowels recites a passage from The Sheltering Sky.
" Because we don't know when we will die
We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times
And a very small number, really
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood
Some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive your life without it?
Perhaps four or five times more
Perhaps not even that
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless"
As the viewer frantically tries to erase and flee from their encroaching fate, narration fills the screen as night creeps in, slowly erasing even their memory of the moon.
Winter Exhibition
Seeing Sounds, Hearing Time was chosen to be apart of UCLA Design + Media Arts Undergrad Winter Exhibition "Acid Reflux", where it was installed alongside fellow student works for public viewing.