Echo's artistic research investigates and transfers the classical instrument qin and its historical playing gesture instruction into the context of post-digital lutherie design speculation (or maybe, design fiction). It explores what highly personalised performative sonic ecosystems could be like if we base them on the transformative potential of the Qi? What would a sustainable pattern language be like, when we base it on the life cycles of plants in the sympoietic environment of a real physical garden and its gardeners? Could artificial intelligence be deployed to help develop such a language, and what artificial instruments would result from such an entanglement?

Bearing these questions in mind, Ho's work aims at developing a new, digital, artistic language that implements machine learning technology to cultivate art intelligence, searching for sympoetic relationships in our disconnected worlds vs music-making. She is working on a hybrid sonic fiction entitled 2.5097481 x 10^-5 Centuries that will be created and performed in real-time of a 22 hours radiophonic opera in September, as a part of the live broadcasting series in the 100 Days of Radio Art Zone programme for Esch2022 – European Capital of the Future.

The fiction-making will take place in her garden in Cologne and online through the entire Spring and Summertime, with various artists partaking in the process to probe a potential sonic ecosystem that enables organic, digital, artificial intelligence and sympoietic collaborations in a physical and digital gardening environment: music-making making the history of humanity. Echo is are prototyping highly personal instruments from plants that had grown, died, and decomposed in this garden, redefining performance concerning bio and neuro diversities, creating timeless scores based on gestures, including human and non-human agents. A "slowly growing body" serves as a metaphor for shaping the highly personalised and community-driven performative sonic ecosystems toward a contemporary practice in sonic ecology and soundscape studies.

During her artistic residency at Phonos, Echo will kick-off the making of the fiction, bringing her harvest of a few rotted plants from the garden and an interactive machine learning tool to build and experiment. She intends to collaborate with machine learning experts associated with the Music Technology Group at UPF to discuss and prototype models for this design speculation.

As part of their stay at Phonos, Echo Ho and Jens Vetter will offer an open seminar on Thursday, April 7 at 15:30h (Campus UPF de Poblenou, Room 55.309, attendance without previous reservation), and a concert on Friday, April 8 at 20h, for which reservation is required.

Echo Ho is a Beijing born Cologne-based sonic artist and performer. Her artistic practice goes beyond sound, music and performance by consistently bringing together different media forms, materials and genres at the intersections of art, philosophy, culture and technology. Her works embodies artistic forms of storytelling that engage with different culturally shaped concepts from a worldview, media history and socio-political perspective. She began from an old idea, art is not a form of representation but a potent force that constantly shapes the world we live in. She envisions breaking through the closed, predetermined cultural frameworks to seek greater connectedness amidst Earth's live matters and environment. Ho’s works have been performed or presented at the He Xiangning Art Museum Shenzhen, Center-A Vancouver, ISEA 2010 Germany, ZKM Karlsruhe, among others. She was a fellow at the Interdisziplinäre Graduiertenschule für Künste und Wissenschaften der Universität der Künste Berlin, taught at the Akademie der Medienkünste in Cologne and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Tangible Music Lab in Linz, Austria.

The ESPORA residency programme is kindly supported by: