This research begins with a simple yet radical question: What if a story does not need a single author? What if meaning could emerge not through control, but through relation—between a human body, a laptop, a gust of wind, the architecture of a mall, or the sonic pulse of a city?
Across the three iterations documented in this project, I investigated how narrative agency can be distributed across a network of human, technological, and more-than-human forces. Each experiment became a site of intra-action—a term drawn from Karen Barad to describe how meaning arises not within things but between them, in their mutual becoming.
From Observation To Participation
Rather than observing the world from a distance, each experiment placed me within it—listening, attuning, responding. Whether it was the light filtered through birch trees in a storm, the rhythms of human movement in De Nieuwe Passage, or the frequency palette of Tokyo’s ambient hums, I engaged not as an external documentarian but as a conduit—a facilitator of interactions between sensing systems, environments, and stories already in motion.
These encounters revealed that meaning is not something we impose, but something we co-create. It is shaped by systems—optical, atmospheric, sonic, algorithmic—that all carry their own forms of authorship. My role was to design the conditions where those agencies could meet and affect each other, where stories could emerge without being pre-written
Fossils and Feedback
A central concept that emerged from the research is the difference between live intra-actions and fossilized traces. Some works—like the soundscape shaped by Storm Conall—were deeply ephemeral, existing only in the moment, never to be repeated in the same way. Others, like the 3D model of De Nieuwe Passage or the layered sound-grown images of Tokyo, were preserved through algorithmic and photographic processes. These I call media fossils—not static representations, but residual forms that carry the memory of entanglements. They can be reactivated, interpreted anew, and made to speak again in different contexts.
In this way, the project proposes that storytelling does not end with an artifact. Meaning lingers, waiting to be rekindled in each new interaction—each time a soundscape is heard, an image is viewed, a space is inhabited. The fossil becomes a threshold between past and future perception.
Transduction as Method, Not Metaphor
At the core of this process is transduction—the translation of one form of energy or data into another. Light into sound. Sound into image. Movement into rhythm. In this thesis, transduction is not just a technical trick, but a philosophical method. It allows us to listen to the world differently, to sense the unsensed, and to create shared spaces between the visible and the invisible, the human and the more-than-human.
Transduction also reconfigures photography. Rather than freezing time into a single moment, these works engage photography as a process of temporal accumulation, of durational presence, of becoming-with. The camera no longer stands for the eye of the human observer. It becomes part of a larger sensory system—active, responsive, shaped by code, sound, and environment.
Reimagining the Role of the Artist
This shift in methodology also calls for a shift in artistic authorship. The artist, in this context, is not a storyteller in the traditional sense. I did not narrate on behalf of the storm, or the mall, or the city. I set up the encounter. I activated a framework. I opened a space in which narrative could emerge—unexpectedly, unpredictably.
This makes space for what I call a site of shared narrativity: a space where narrative agency is distributed, and where meaning is not owned but shared across a constellation of agents—biotic and abiotic, digital and organic, ephemeral and archival.
Towards a Post-Anthropocentric Storytelling
Ultimately, my research is an argument for a post-anthropocentric mode of storytelling. It asks us to move beyond the need to centralize ourselves in the stories we tell. To listen more carefully. To transduce rather than translate. To sense before we interpret. And to acknowledge the agency of the world around us—not just as context, but as participant.
In times of ecological crisis and technological acceleration, this shift is not just aesthetic. It is ethical. It invites new ways of relating, new ways of perceiving, and new ways of creating meaning—together.