Interval

Interval draws on recordings Bai gathered in Shenzhen arcades between 2005 and 2008. Game effects, electronic noise, conversation, coins, buttons, and room reverberation preserve a particular urban soundscape. Nearly two decades later, the material functions not only as artistic source material but also as an auditory record of an earlier Shenzhen.

In response to the context of Pingshan Art Museum’s Sound Cityscape exhibition in 2025, Bai returned to this archive and used a contemporary algorithmic process to segment, randomly dismantle, and nonlinearly recombine it. The urban-soundscape theme prompted the return to the archive; the algorithm was the present-day method through which the older material was processed.

The special collaboration first took the form of a new online audiovisual work. Bai subsequently extracted its sound layer and released it as an independent track on streaming platforms, allowing the sound to leave its exhibition-image relationship and continue in another mode of circulation.

The same recordings had also appeared in the 2015 visual work Interval, where location sound, moving image, and electronic music were organized primarily through manual editing. The 2025 version dismantles and recombines the same archive algorithmically, preserving the difference between two periods and two methods of handling the same site.