Neural Impermanence

Type: Sound Installation
Materials: Computer, Motion Sensor, Speakers, Funnels
Year: 2025
Exhibition: Timescapes, UdK Rundgang 2025

A sound installation uses Pure Data patches that adapt the topology of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network.

Each layer consists of audio-based “neurons” that combine and process incoming signals through weighted multiplications and non-linear function, producing a continuous yet fluctuating field of sound activations.

Rather than triggering sound generation, motion detector hidden in multilayer funnels modulates the system’s ongoing behaviors. Its presence disrupts the sonic field, causing shifts that emerge from and dissolve back into the ongoing flow of artificial neural activations.

Time within this piece is not as fixed duration, but as modulated attention: it listens, it responds, and it forgets.

In Buddhist term, Kṣaṇas, the smallest unit of time, describing a fleeting instant when a thought arises and vanishes. Ancient Buddhist texts like Abhidharma Mahāvibhāṣā Śāstra (《大毘婆沙論》), recorded complex time calculation systems, which proposed that there are 6,480,000 Kṣaṇas in a single day and night, leading to the conclusion that each Kṣaṇa approximately equal to 1/75 of a second.

Although the term was not originally coined to measure time, this patch attempt to translate it: the floating, driven by a [metro 13.333] object, unfold in micro-timescale fragments: sound motion varies, and recedes with impermanence, where interruption acts as emergence, and time is listened through.