Life as Condition
2026Life as Condition is a live sound performance built around a self-running feedback system. Sound from the space is continuously captured and returned to the system, where it is filtered, delayed, accumulated and gradually transformed. Most sounds disappear quickly; others remain, forming resonances, unstable loops and textures that can sustain themselves for much longer than expected.
The performer enters this process without directly controlling it. Heartbeat and breath interfere with the conditions of the feedback, shifting its stability, duration and decay. A small bodily change may leave almost no trace, or push the system towards a completely different state.
The work began from an interest in what happens when sound is allowed to continue without being constantly organised by a performer. The system can run on its own, and the body becomes less a controller than something temporarily passing through it — disturbing, feeding and altering what is already happening.
Life as Condition looks at this unstable relationship between persistence and disappearance, asking where agency sits when neither the performer nor the system is entirely in control. Sound exists here less as an object to be produced than as something dependent on a set of conditions: space, energy, feedback, time, and the presence or absence of a body.
This project was performed at the Ääniaalto X music festival in Helsinki.