[Non-Music] Sustainable Creativity - Before Fading Away: Resonator - Chao-Ming Ko & Tzu-Han Lu & Po-Hao Chang

Ling Tan
2 days ago
1 min read

🌏 Sustainable Creativity Prize - 2025 Clare C. & Friends Fellowship

About Project

This work explores the theatre as a micro-ecological system built by bodies, technologies, and audiences. It asks: Before everything disappears, can we still resonate here? Inspired by the Gaia Hypothesis, which views Earth as a co-adaptive, self-regulating organism, the performance frames each bodily action as part of a larger, shared energy system.

Led by three creators from choreography, sound, and stage installation, the project dissolves traditional artistic boundaries. Instead, movement, sound, and spatial construction become energy-generating acts. We do not depict the absence of power—we produce it. Lights are lit, sounds are made, and the stage is assembled through labor. The performance begins in darkness, like entering a cave, and unfolds only as energy is created in real-time.

Our team has developed a piezoelectric lighting system using piezo components and LED modules. Piezoelectricity is a physical phenomenon where specific crystals (like quartz or ceramics) generate small voltages under pressure or impact. Commonly used in sensors and micro-energy devices, this principle is reimagined here as a theatrical energy source.

When performers strike or press on devices and instruments, the piezo materials convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, triggering LED lights. Reflective structures amplify the dim light. This system also functions within musical instruments, forming feedback loops of motion, sound, and light. Hand-crank generators supplement the system for sustained or high-intensity light outputs, offering flexible and expressive energy control.

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