Work> DRIFT IN TIME
An (Art) piece chasing memories of ice through time and live sound.
#Artwork #AudioVisual
DRIFT IN TIME is a co-creation by ULTRACOMBOS and the Taiwanese quartet Cicada. As part of ULTRACOMBOS’ ongoing series that explores environmental questions, the work explores the relationship between climate change and humanity, beginning with the Memory of Ice.
A live musical performance becomes a moving space shaped by real-time visuals. The audience steps into a dislocated timescape, encountering millennia of memory through the brief scale of a human life.
DRIFT IN TIME does not preach. It adopts an observer’s gaze, quietly revealing the perceptions we are losing to climate change, the beautiful and the grotesque, the tender and the perilous, all unfolding with a calm, unflinching neutrality.
The music draws from Cicada’s 2025 album, Gazing the Shades of White. Following the traces of glaciers, Cicada traveled to sites of glacial retreat, from Iceland and Greenland to New Zealand’s South Island, bridging between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
The work unfolds in five chapters, corresponding to the album’s five tracks. Sound drives the visual flow, slow and serene at first, yet unmistakably vivid.
The visual system echoes the forms and hues of ice, dissolution marks, translucent layering, and shifting strata. Through programmed analysis, the spectrum and rhythm generated during the performance are translated into parameters that steer the visuals, shaping color, texture, and pattern in real time. Each session produces imagery that is singular and non-repeatable, much like glaciers themselves, always moving, dissolving, and recoalescing.
DRIFT IN TIME premiered in 2025 at the Ars Electronica Festival’s Deep Space 8K. In the same year, an installation version was presented at the C-LAB Sound Arts Festival.
This installation was a separate collaboration with sound artist Yu-De Lin. Fragments of the original music were reworked into suggestive natural soundscapes, water drops, ice slips, and distant drifts. Presented across five screen formats, the installation leaned into a more experimental language.
2025 Ars Electronica Festival, Linz
* Photos and videos provided by C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab.
2025 C-LAB Sound Festival: DIVERSONICS
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