The Collapse of a Microcosm is a site-specific sound and light installation that enacts the processes of remembrance and reconstruction of its environment — an ephemeral archive of the present as it fades into the past. At its core, the work is a distributed system comprising dozens of artificial memory modules consisting of leds that cover a whole visual spectrum of the human eye and a set of photosensors covering a large spectrum of visible and non-visible light. Each module is equipped with a miniature speaker and arranged in a multi-layered loop. This spatial choreography creates an intricate network of sensing and transmission in which environmental data — sunlight fluctuations resulting from the day-night cycle and changing weather, ambient light shifts and human presence within the gallery — are registered, translated and passed on in a recursive chain of effect.

Throughout the day, each unit gathers traces of its surroundings and propagates its accumulated impressions to the next, eventually forming a loop. In doing so, the system constructs a fragile, non-linear memory of a day’s cycle — a day represented by light and sound echoing into the space’s walls and floor. Each ‘memory vector’ is articulated through a distinct tone, creating a sonic imprint of difference: a comparison between what is and what was, producing a layered harmonic field that feels alive — breathing, murmuring and unfolding.

The result is a visual and sonic tapestry that stitches together time, sensation and technological cognition. The installation embodies change, rather than merely reflecting it — its body of photons and vibrations becomes a medium of transition. As visitors move through the space, their shadows, movements and presence are inscribed within the system and reabsorbed into memory loops, where they are transformed into sound and vision. In this way, human bodies become part of the installation’s sensory ecology, participating in a feedback loop that collapses the distinction between subject and system, observer and observed.

The Collapse of a Microcosm invites a contemplative reorientation of our relationship to perception, time, and the technological systems that mediate them. It resides in liminal spaces—between memory and immediacy, light and sound, organic change and algorithmic process. By blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, it gestures toward an alternative ecology—one in which machines no longer reproduce the world from a distance, but participate in its becoming. This is a resonant ecology, not of control or simulation, but of attunement: a shared field of temporal resonance where light becomes memory, memory becomes tone, and tone becomes world.