HZ-0 (Deep Time) is a multi-sensory sound installation that translates planetary processes into perceptual experience. Working across temporal scales, the piece brings together real-time environmental sensing and long-duration climate data, allowing the immediate atmosphere and deep time to coexist within a single sonic system.

At the centre of the installation is a specially designed sensing device: a hand-blown glass vessel embedded with environmental sensors that register local conditions such as temperature, humidity, air pressure, and particulate matter. These signals are continuously combined with global datasets, including atmospheric CO₂ concentration, Arctic sea ice extent, and biodiversity indices. Together, they form an evolving feedback system that links the exhibition space to planetary change.

The sound structure unfolds through three temporal layers:

a slow atmospheric drift shaped by CO₂, a responsive and cyclical signal derived from ice extent, and a long-duration transformation based on biodiversity data, unfolding across the duration of the exhibition.

These processes are spatialised through a multi-channel sound system and extended into the body through a circular sonic bench, where low-frequency vibrations render deep time physically perceptible.

Rather than presenting data as information, HZ-0 operates as a listening system—one that translates environmental change into shifting sonic and tactile conditions. The work resists direct representation, accumulation, thinning, and disappearance.

The installation constructs a non-linear experience of time, oscillating between presence and absence, continuity and loss. Visitors, therefore, are not passive listeners, but become part of the system itself, positioned within a field where sensing, sound, and perception are continuously entangled.

Across the duration of each exhibition, HZ-0 evolves slowly and invites sustained attention to the temporalities of planetary change, and to the possibility of sensing the Earth not as a distant abstraction, but as a shared, unfolding condition.

Sound Design by Dave Meckin