Formed in 2018, Team TRIAD is a collective of three sound artists, Gwangmin Hong, Minje Jeon, and Honam Kim, who engage in ongoing experimentation with media.
Team TRIAD, formed in 2018, is a collective
of three artists—Gwangmin Hong, Minje Jeon, and Honam Kim—who engage in ongoing
experiments across media.
They read and interpret data from
contemporary society, including urban environments, through both objective and
subjective lenses, and continue to create works that translate hidden
narratives into new visual and sonic forms.
The name Team TRIAD derives from the
musical term triad, referring to a three-note chord composed of different
pitches. As the name suggests, Gwangmin Hong, Minje Jeon, and Honam Kim have
collaborated in an ensemble-like format centered on the shared medium of sound,
offering new auditory experiences through soundscapes.
Gwangmin Hong, who has long explored the
diverse possibilities of media and sound, focuses on composition and spatial
sound design within Team TRIAD. Drawing on musique concrète techniques that
involve collecting sounds from various environments, he works with electroacoustic
elements, ambient sounds, and technology as materials to create new forms of
sound and music.
Minje Jeon concentrates on expanding
messages through appropriate media. He analyzes related subjects or phenomena
as data, translates the insights he discovers into algorithms, and develops
works from there. These algorithms materialize as systems that take the form of
programming, sound, or media. In sound-centered works, he employs multiple
media to construct intense and immersive soundscapes.
Lastly, Honam Kim is interested in
transforming diverse forms of information into instruments and interfaces,
through which he has presented a wide range of exhibitions and performances.
Within the team, he focuses on building devices that create a coherent context
between music and non-music. Beyond device-making itself, he explores ways of
engaging with various audiences to propose new modes of use and interaction.
Team TRIAD,
The Musical Score of City: Jongno, 2018, Data sonification,
sound performance. ©Team TRIADTheir practice begins with sharing the
questions and concerns each member brings to the table. The collective believes
that issues permeating people are also inscribed in the places they inhabit,
and they seek to read such traces within the urban environments we encounter,
translating them into artistic expression.
The Musical Score of the City:
Jongno (2018) marks their first attempt to weave together each
member’s individual approach to sound into a single work. The project takes its
point of departure from The Musical Score of the City
(2017), a work by Minje Jeon, and develops into a musical and sound performance
based on data and visual materials collected from Jongno District.
Team TRIAD,
The Musical Score of City: Jongno, 2018, Data sonification,
sound performance. ©Team TRIADThe Musical Score of the City:
Jongno is grounded in objective visuals and sounds generated through
a building data–based algorithm, drawing on thirty years of architectural data
from Jongno District. Upon this foundation, subjective sounds—each interpreted
and performed by the three artists—are layered to complete the work.
These subjective sound elements often took
shape through experimental structures and improvisational passages during the
performance process, incorporating a wide range of variable and fluid
components.
In their subsequent work, Data
Pulse: Incheon (2019), Team TRIAD reinterpreted the distinctive
characteristics of the city of Incheon by expanding them into an audiovisual
medium. For this project, the artists collected and analyzed a wide range of
data from Incheon, using it as the material foundation of the work.
The data included video and sound
recordings from the city; air quality data from 2018 covering fine dust (PM10),
ultrafine dust (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and nitrogen
dioxide across Incheon’s 17 districts; as well as urban data such as above- and
below-ground building levels, building coverage ratios, floor area ratios, road
information, and the volume and types of import and export cargo handled by the
city in 2018.
From the constant inflow and outflow of
goods and people through this port city—spreading across the nation and
converging again in Incheon—Team TRIAD identified a rhythm akin to that of a
circulatory system.
Cargo moves like blood, transportation
routes resemble veins, the city functions as an organ, and buildings act as
cells, all pulsing in time with the heartbeat of Incheon. Data Pulse:
Incheon evokes this rhythm of urban data as it shifts along
logistical flows, activating multiple senses to render the city’s dynamic
metabolism perceptible.
Meanwhile, in the exhibition 《A.I.MAGINE》 held at the Urban Data Science
Lab in 2018, Team TRIAD created Urban Jaesaeng Device, an
instrument that plays back and recycles disappearing sites in Seoul.
Paradoxically, this work originated from an
imagination of the future yet to come. Team TRIAD speculated that what we may
long to create in a more technologically advanced future could in fact be the
past—something no longer accessible or visible. This contemplation became the
starting point of the work.
Team TRIAD drew inspiration from the
phonautograph, known as the earliest device for recording sound, in developing
Urban Jaesaeng Device. The phonautograph disappeared from
history due to its critical limitation—it could not play back the sounds it
recorded. However, with contemporary technology, sounds originally recorded in
1860 were eventually recovered and made audible.
Echoing the revival of 19th-century sounds
preserved by the phonautograph, Urban Jaesaeng Device
emerged from the artists’ imagination that highly advanced machine learning
technologies might one day resurrect the past—or a present on the verge of
disappearance. By regenerating the context and form of the phonautograph into a
new instrument, Team TRIAD sought to design an experience in which places in
Seoul that are becoming part of the past are played back and recycled through
sound.
Through performances that “play”
quantitative and qualitative place-based data—compiled from diverse
records—using the Urban Jaesaeng Device, the work connects
and expands an imaginative axis spanning past, present, and future. In doing
so, it evokes alternative sensory perceptions and memories of the time-space in
which we live.
Subsequently, Urban Jaesaeng
Device expanded into a device that replays traces of various cities
and evolved into a spatial sound environment. For instance, Urban
Jaesaeng Device #2: Sound Walk (2022) invites participants to sense
the city by walking among dozens of radios, much as one perceives the urban
environment while moving through it.
The analogue radios deliver the experience
of using tiny hand sensations to pick up transmitted signals and listen with
our ears. In the process of exploring the river of noise between each channel,
users gain the capacity to listen independently to the sound itself.
This work transfers how to use analog
radios and listening experience of them into outdoor space and simulates
experiences of listening in the city. The three artists divide the entire space
into three sections and present urban sounds that each of them has created.
These sounds are simultaneously heard individually and combined as a single
rumble, creating a new auditory experience.
As though wandering through a city, viewers
hear different sounds according to their different positions. In this process,
they become able to perceive space newly not as a single big acoustic mass but
as a gathering of small individual sounds.
While Urban Jaesaeng Device #2:
Sound Walk focuses on linear movement and the experiences of viewers
approaching sound, Urban Jaesaeng Device #3 Rotary (2022)
uses traffic volume data from Cheongju intersections to concentrate on the
movement of curved, revolving and cyclical sound coming to us.
This work uses the principle of rotary
speakers, in which a motor on a central axis turns the speakers in real time.
The Doppler effect created through various changes in speed creates unique
tones. Viewers can autonomously hear the different tones converging as the
revolution speed increases and decreases according to transit data from
Cheongju intersections.
Furthermore, in their 2024 work Urban
Jaeseng Device #4: Phantom Pain, Team TRIAD examines the perception
of dystopian representation by processing the urban data of Seoul and Pyongyang
into light and sound.
For this project, the artists compressed
video and sound extracted from media sources in the two cities to generate
color spectra. Although the images drawn from each system reveal differing
political and social contexts around similar themes, they are intersected and
collide through the artists’ intervention, ultimately being reduced into a
single pixel.
The data from both cities is transformed
into a color spectrum, with two projectors facing each other in a parallel
configuration and illuminating each other. Through this configuration, the
artists interpret representation as a process of projection. In other words,
they propose that representation involves projecting an image onto an object.
In this context, the viewer’s body becomes
another medium, functioning as a screen upon which images appear in fragmented
and dispersed forms. As viewers walk between the installations, their bodies
interrupt the paths of light, altering the positions and spectra of color. At
the same time, the projector beams are cast directly onto their bodies without
the mediation of a screen, producing an experience in which space itself seems
sliced and segmented by light.
The soundscape, like the spectral imagery, is
composed through a process of compression, transforming urban sound data into a
newly constructed auditory form. These sounds, which fragment urban auditory
experiences, are organized around specific themes, with thematic elements and
images synchronized to the duration of the sounds.
Through these practices, Team TRIAD
translates and reconstructs urban data into light and sound through diverse
media experiments, activating senses dulled by an overload of information and
revealing overlooked narratives hidden within it.
Structured as multilayered sound
environments, their works position the audience’s movement and body as central
elements, leading viewers toward an active auditory experience—one that invites
them to walk through and perceive everyday space and time with renewed
sensibilities.
“If sound-based work calls
attention to auditory experience and perception, data-driven work calls
attention to the very concepts through which we view the world. In an
information society, we are buried under vast amounts of data. As a result, our
sensitivity to data itself has grown numb. (…)
That is why we reveal, as they are and
even violently, the raw weight carried by data and numbers. At the same time,
we discover overlooked stories hidden within their continuity. Encouraging
people to see the world anew through data—that is the context we hope to convey
through our data-driven works.” (Team TRIAD, interview with IFACNEWS 3.0)
Team TRIAD, formed in 2018, consists of
three artists—Gwangmin Hong, Minje Jeon, and Honam Kim. Their solo exhibitions
and performances include 《Noise Walk》 (Citizens’ Hall [Sound Gallery], Seoul, 2022), 《Urban Jaesaeng Device #2: Radiophonic Orchestration》 (Space Type, Seoul, 2020), and 《Data Pulse:
Incheon》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2019).
The team has also participated in numerous
group exhibitions, including 《The Radiant City, Dark
Rapture - Dystopian Images of the Modern City》 (SeMA
Bunker, Seoul, 2024), 《MMCA Cheongju Project: Urban
Resonance》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary
Art, Cheongju, 2022), 《A.I.MAGINE》 (Urban Data Science Lab, Seoul, 2018), and 《Neotopia:
Data and Humanity》 (Art Center Nabi, Seoul, 2017).
