Sonic Translations
2025
Sonic Translations
Artistic research collaboration between Vidmina Stasiulytė and Erika Blomgren
To translate is to listen through difference — to allow one form to echo within another.
In Sonic Translations, the act of listening becomes a philosophical inquiry into transformation itself. The work exists as a translation of translation of translation — a continuous unfolding where sound, matter, image, and algorithm pass through one another. Nothing remains fixed; everything vibrates with its own becoming.
Fashion researchers Vidmina Stasiulytė and Erika Blomgren begin with the Sonic Palette, a collection of 3D-printed textile samples that are both tactile and acoustic entities — bodies with their own sonic potential. Vidmina performs these textiles-instruments, touching them into resonance; sound arises not as expression but as event, as the material’s own utterance. Erika listens and transcribes this utterance into drawing, tracing the vibration through rhythm, direction, and form.
Then the process turns again — the drawn sound is feeded to an AI generative system, an algorithmic ear that reinterprets the visual into new sonic articulations. This third voice, neither human nor material, becomes a mirror that distorts and reveals — a machinic imagination translating the already translated.
Through this recursive choreography, Sonic Translations gestures toward an ecology of sensing — where the human, the material, and the algorithm co-compose in resonance. Meaning is never possessed but continually deferred, vibrating between bodies, gestures, and codes. The work asks: when sound travels through matter, through drawing, through the logic of the machine — what remains of the original impulse? Or does each translation become a new ontology, a new mode of listening?
Here, translation is not transmission but transformation — a practice of attunement to the intervals between senses, where sound becomes visible, and the visible begins to sound.