How can paintings and music be transformed into immersive digital environments that respond to sound?

Propagation is a collaborative project with South Korean artist Jisu Kim to explore the reach of her series of paintings entitled Untitled-n (referred to as 'the mother paintings') into the realm of digital and audio-reactive art installations. Kim's work, which explores the intimate connection between the physical and emotional body and its environment, reflects on themes of memory, place, and time through a visual language that draws on both personal experience and the traditional concept of San SuHwa (Shan Sui)—a landscape style that she reinterprets as regeneration through representations of bones, muscles, organs, and blood.

For this collaboration, selected digitised paintings from Kim's Mother Paintings series were paired with a contemporary piece of music. The technical development involved the creation of an audio-reactive point cloud visualisation system that allowed the colour data from Kim's paintings to emerge in a fluid, abstract environment designed to respond to a performance in a virtual reality environment.

Ongoing research aims to present Propagation as both a video installation and a VR short film, blending physical and virtual art forms with live audio. The current stage of development of the project was presented by the artist during the fifth EAREAR exhibition in Munich.