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On April 11 and 12, 2026, we ran nodes:ii — our second iteration of the research-and-development showcase, in collaboration with Onassis ONX in Tribeca. The first attempt at activating WHITEBOX and BLACKBOX at the same time. Seventeen practitioners across two days.
View the Full Interview Here
Partnership: Onassis ONX
Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies, with studios in Athens and New York.
This issue is the last in a four-month editorial cadence. Shaping Of conversations with the four practitioners we sat with on-site at nodes:ii: Jungeun Park, Helen Yin Chen, Testu Collective, OHYUNG + Taehee. One per month, April through July. Read our previous month’s Shaping Of, with OHYUNG + Taehee, here.
Shaping of [Listening to the Ether]
Artifact: Listening to the Ether + Flux
Artist: Testue Collective
Location: WHITEBOX & BLACKBOX Stage, nodes:ii
Site: Onassis ONX, Tribeca
Interview conducted on-site at Onassis ONX, April 12, 2026.
Interviewer: Sarah Kim.
[The Ether is Not a Metaphor]
There is a layer of sound under the city that nobody composed. It comes off ATMs and neon signs and car alarms and the electrical spine of every building — the electromagnetic exhaust of ordinary machines, continuous, ambient, and audible to no one.
Testu Collective have spent years learning to hear it. Listening to the Ether is that listening given a body.
The title borrows a word physics gave up on. The Luminiferous Aether was the invisible medium nineteenth-century science needed to explain how light crossed empty space — searched for, never found, discarded by 1900.
What stood on the floor at nodes:ii was a table holding three rotating discs, each seeded with a pattern of magnets beneath its surface. Three guitar pickup coils on cables, and an implied instruction to pick one up, bring it close to a turning disc, and listen.
Dan: Listening to the Ether is a drum machine that is three rotating discs with patterns of magnets, within each disc. And it can be listened to with a guitar pickup coil. All three of the people who can play it can hear the track that’s a collaboration of all three discs simultaneously. So each individual experience in the work is kind of affecting each other.
A drum machine is doing quiet work in that sentence. A drum machine is the most sequenced object in electronic music — a grid, a pattern, a loop that returns on time because returning on time is the whole point. Testu built one that cannot repeat, cannot be programmed from a screen, and changes depending on how many hands are on it.
The physics is two centuries old and the whole of it fits in a sentence: move a magnet near a coil of copper wire and you get a current you can hear. It is what happens under the strings of every electric guitar. Testu changed one variable. Instead of a string vibrating hundreds of times a second, they used a disc of magnets turning between 40 and 120 times a minute — slow enough that a tone becomes a rhythm. Under the table: an Arduino, three motors, an audio interface, a stack of magnets. That is the entire instrument.
[Listening to Hear]
Before the table there was a telephone pickup coil.
Serena: I first bought a telephone pickup coil, which you can easily get for $7. And I would say in the DIY experimental music scene, a lot of people use EMF pickups. And I started discovering them a lot during Covid — we would take walks through Chinatown at night and just bring different EMF pickup coils with headphones. Everything is chaos in New York. And then there’s this sort of organized chaos underneath it. You’re walking down the street and you hear a rhythm of someone’s car alarm, or some pitter patter of an ATM machine, or some neon lights. Maybe you’re annoyed at NYC, and then you listen in on the EMF sounds and it’s like, oh, this is a whole new perspective.
Dan calls the devices “anti-radios”: receivers tuned not to a broadcast but to the signature bleeding off ordinary hardware, signal nobody sent. The coil has been repurposed before — its first users clipped them to landline handsets to listen in on calls, the pre-internet hobbyists called “phone phreakers”. The same part, repurposed twice — once by phone phreaks, once by Testu — both times by people outside the industry that built it.
Which is the DIY sound community’s real proposition. Not that the equipment is within reach — it always was — but that the knowledge of what to do with it moves hand to hand, in scenes, on walks, between people who show each other. Testu’s practice reads as an extension of that lineage.
Dan traces his interest to Dada’s sound apparatus, the wound-up noise boxes that put engineering inside sculpture — objects like Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, a ball of twine clamped between two brass plates with an unidentified object sealed inside by someone else, so that the work exists only when you shake it and neither artist nor audience knows what is making the sound.
Serena names a pioneer of her own:
Serena: After Dada, I would say another big influence is the pioneering German sound artist Christina Kubisch. She pioneered working with EMF. It’s actually through an accident — she was setting up her sound installation with induction, and she started hearing all these different frequencies, and she realized, oh, these are EMFs. And this is back in the 70s. So she started these things called electrical sound walks. She made headphones with the EMF coils in them, and she would take people walking throughout different cities. You were part of the composition with her headphones. As you’re moving, your body is creating the composition of sound.
Kubisch built the induction coils into the headphones themselves and sent people out wearing them. The series is called Electrical Walks: participants take a route through a city — past security gates, ATMs, tram lines, lit shopfronts — and hear whatever each piece of hardware is leaking as they pass it.
Testu’s table does the same thing without the walking. The discs turn regardless of anyone and the work activates when the pickup coils interact with them.
[Flux, and the Hand Behind the Screen]
Serena calls magnetism the glue of everything they make, the thing holding the sound work and the visual work to each other. Flux, the performance they staged at nodes:ii, is a separate work that puts those same forces on a screen.
The screen filled with dark matter organizing itself, powder pulling into filaments, breaking, spreading. What the audience was watching was a macro lens pointed at a vibrating plate.
Dan: We were using pigment-grade steel — this is like five microns — and it can self-organize into really beautiful patterns. So the choreography on that was my hand with a magnet, but the whole plate was also vibrating. As the magnet is controlling the powder, the whole thing is shifting and it’s able to spread and show really interesting organic movements that it normally wouldn’t be able to. It would normally just cluster and turn into spiky objects and then fall away. But with the cymatic effect, it’s able to evolve a bit more. The second part of it was a speaker cone, which is a different type of magnetic technology, but we were using Lycopodium powder, which is moss spores. And those were self-assembling into little nucleus and cellular structures. They really form these organic patterns on the speaker cone as they’re exposed to sine waves.
Making sound visible through vibrating particles is called cymatics, and it runs from Ernst Chladni’s bowed plates in 1787 to Hans Jenny, who named the field in the 1960s. Lycopodium powder is the classical material for the demonstration.
What Testu did was run a two-hundred-year-old physics experiment at the scale of a projection screen.
Serena: And I think flux is a perfect word because of course it’s fluctuating force fields — electricity is never perfect, right? It’s always being modulated, it’s always this organic thing. And that’s also what we love about it. It’s sort of the total opposite of AI. It’s perfectly imperfect, essentially.
Several people came up to Testu after the set to ask what software had generated the visuals, and then looked over and saw the plate, the magnet, and the artist’s hands.
The audience’s mistake is the most interesting thing that happened at Flux. Watching matter behave organically in real time, a room of people fluent in new media assumed a generative program. The default has flipped, and organic behavior now reads as simulation, with the burden of proof landing on the physical world.
Testu’s answer is not to explain but to keep the hand in the frame. They place the work in the tradition of Expanded Cinema, which Gene Youngblood defined in 1970 as work that pushed film past the projector into live and process-based forms. The image is made in the room, in front of you, out of material, and the performance is the making rather than the playback.
[Research That Refuses to End]
Listening to the Ether began as a fan with a magnet taped to it.
It made a remarkable sound and was nobody’s idea of a finished object, and getting from there to something safe to touch and good to look at was most of the work. Testu’s early versions were three separate boxes with magnets taped onto the discs, swapped and re-taped through each round; their collaborator Mike Romeo programmed the motor speeds and built in the randomization. It was Testu’s first time working with motors at any real scale, which meant a long fight with wobble, an eight-hour workshop in Andy Cavatorta’s studio on the differences between motor types, and a stack of books on magnetism.
Serena: I really do love research. And I think research is the most fun part about it. Building it is fun too. But the research and the ideating and just ideas that excite us between science and art — that’s probably the most important part of our work, I would say. And continuing to do research — it doesn’t just end here. Which is ultimately what this Artifice show is about, right? This is like version 2.0, but what will version 5.0 be?
That question — what will version 5.0 be — is the actual subject of nodes:ii, and you could watch it being worked on in real time. Testu almost never left the table. They stood beside it for two days, showing people how to hold the coil, watching what happened when they didn’t, and treating every “misuse” as information.
Some visitors gripped the pickup by the wrong end and scraped the discs. Others held it perfectly still, waiting for a loop that was never going to arrive. Musicians picked it up and immediately began gesturing with it, moving it through the air, and understood the piece quickly. Some people stayed ten minutes and just listened.
Most exhibitions are built to conceal this stage, but nodes:ii was built to expose it. Testu took the invitation, standing beside the piece while it ran under observation. Serena is wary of the word interactive — it covers too much to mean anything, and what it describes here is closer to a psychological test: how people actually use the thing, measured against how you imagined they would.
Serena: “Interactive is such a subjective word. It’s also just psychological tests in a way — to see how people experience what we created, and then how other people use it. There are upgrades we’re going to make just based on what we learned seeing how people interacted this weekend. Interactive art is ultimately about being human — how humans interact with your creation.”
Two days of observation produced a design question that challenged their instinct to add—that’s what R&D looks like when the term is more than decorative. The exhibition was a research instrument, and audience provided the readings.
[ Customization as an Act of Resistance]
What Dan keeps returning to is touch, and specifically the moment the coil nears the disc and you feel the pull before you hear anything.
Dan: The most amazing thing to experience with it is when you do get that pickup coil really close to that disc — you can feel the pull, the force between the magnets and the pickup. That tactility is really important. And I think that’s really what people are drawn to, because you’re drawing energy straight through the air and there’s no contact between the actual magnets. The gesture, and playing with other people, it’s all very organic.
Serena: The biggest thing we’ve been exploring is these sort of invisible things around us, and tactility — not only bringing it audible and visible, but especially in the sound I try to create, whether it’s my own music or in installations. I feel like tactility and tangibility are sort of an act of resistance, especially in the climate and era we live in, where everything is AI-driven, where we’re living in software or living on our computers all the time. I want people to feel the sound I’m making.
Note what is being resisted. Not the computer but the distance.
Serena: Technology to me is just a tool. Everyone focuses so much on the technology that they’re using versus how they’re using it. It could be old technology, it could be new. I’m more interested in how you’re using it and what interesting ways you could rework it or modify it — than saying, I’m just using TouchDesigner or Ableton. That sort of means really nothing to me.
What Testu resist is not computation. They use Ableton to generate the sine waves that drive the cymatics; there is an Arduino in the table and an audio interface under it. Dan is clear that software is a means, not the point. What they reject is a finished tool that quietly dictates the work’s possibilities and then gets mistaken for the idea itself.
Ableton and TouchDesigner are not villains in this account. They are answers to a question nobody asked. The question Testu keep asking is what the idea needs, and then which technology — a $7 coil from the age of landlines, moss spores, an algorithm from Euclid, a fan with a magnet taped to it — will get them there.
That is what customization means here, and why it functions as resistance rather than preference. An optimized tool has already decided which outcomes are cheap and which are expensive, and a practice will drift toward the cheap ones without ever noticing it chose. Modifying the tool — or building it out of parts that predate the software entirely — is how you keep the decision.
Testu are not making an argument against the machine. They are making an argument against letting the machine finish the sentence, and it is also why the research never closes. If the tool is only ever a means to the next idea, there is no version that counts as done — only version 2.0, currently being watched, on its way to version 5.0.
Which brings it back to three people around a table, each holding a coil and hearing a rhythm none of them can claim. The force in each coil is the same one Faraday described, moving through the air slowly enough to dance to.
Sincere thank you to Serena Stucke and Dan Tesene of Testu Collective for their generosity in sitting down with us for a conversation.
Curatorial Note
Testu brought two works to nodes:ii, an installation and a performance, both running on the same forces: magnetism, induction, and fields that cross a room unnoticed.
The table spent two days being used by visitors while the artists watched closely.
Testu treated the exhibition as part of the build, which is what the showcase was for.
Artifice NYC: Call for Board Member
Artifice NYC is looking for a Treasurer to join our Board of Directors.
As Artifice moves from a series of programs toward a durable curatorial research organization, we are building the governance and financial infrastructure required to sustain the work. We are looking for someone to shape the future of curatorial research.
The Treasurer will work closely with Artifice’s leadership and Board of Directors to oversee the annual budget, review financial reporting and internal controls, support required filings, and help guide the organization’s financial decisions as it grows.
We are looking for someone who:
Is confident reading budgets and financial statements
Can attend quarterly board meetings and contribute between meetings when needed
Is based in New York and able to engage with Artifice’s programs firsthand
Understands, or is willing to learn, nonprofit governance and fiduciary responsibility
Can strengthen the organization through fundraising, strategic introductions, professional expertise, or direct support
Send your interest to info@artificenyc.org
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RADAR: Our Discovery Signals
A short list of what we’ve been in the room for, and where we’re going next. Focused on local NYC IRL. Join the chat to discover what our community is shaping.
IRL SIGNALS
I: (Dis)content | Aug 2, 2026 | by UAAD | @ MESH Art Center, NYC. Learn more.
“Through performance, interactive installations, and live generative media, (Dis)consent explores how consent, in an age of algorithms and ecological crisis, is assumed, negotiated, withdrawn, and manipulated in real time. Audiences are invited to command bodies, contribute data, reshape algorithmically generated images, and participate in speculative ecological systems.”
II: New York Immersive Invitational | Aug 23, 2026 | by The Immersive Experience Institute | @ Culture Lab LIC, Long Island City. Learn more.
"Five immersive creators from across New York City have accepted an extraordinary challenge: conceive, design, build, rehearse, and premiere an entirely new immersive experience in less than 48 hours. The result is an evening of daring, unpredictable, and wholly original work that can only exist for this moment.”
URL SIGNALS
III: Workshop: Bad Apple ANYTHING with TouchDesigner | Aug 9, 2026 | by Andrew Sun | @ Online. Learn more.
"This workshop aims to teach participants one of the classic TouchDesigner workflows of geometry copying, and how to control the behaviour of duplicated copies via video data to create their own version of Bad Apple.”
IV: Gathering Otherwise #1: Collective Kite Flying | Aug 13, 2026 online | by Institute of Machine Unlearning | @ Online. Learn more.
“Gathering Otherwise is a monthly experiment in anti-networking. The gathering takes place in a small interactive website built by the Institute of Machine Unlearning. Everyone who enters is given a kite. You can fly around, take a picture, or shout into the sky. Nothing is stored or archived. Come hang out between your online meetings that could have been an email, for two minutes or twenty, you make the rules. Bring a coffee if you’d like.”
GRANTS OR OPPORTUNITIES
V: Processing Community Day NYC Open Call | Deadline Aug 15, 2026 | by Processing | @ NYU ITP, Brooklyn. Learn more.
"PCD is a global, community-led celebration that brings together artists, designers, technologists, educators, and open-source communities across the world. We’re looking for presentations, workshops, Processing sketches, A/V performance for the afterparty, and more.”
VI: garden3d | Hiring: Head of Design | @ New York. Learn more.
"We are a worker owned creative collective, innovating on everything from brands and IRL communities to IoT devices and cross platform apps. We share profit, open source everything, spin out new businesses, and invest in exciting ideas through financial and/or in-kind contributions.”
RADAR is an open channel. If you’re hosting, making, gathering, or searching for collaborators, we invite you to share. This section exists for community calls, needs, offerings, and future alignments.
Think Inside the Box
Artifice NYC is a curatorial research platform exploring how creative science and new media fiction shape cultural experiences. It treats science and fiction as tools for prototyping speculative futures—testing how ideas become environments, interfaces, and behaviors. This work is organized through two formats: WHITEBOX (lab) and BLACKBOX (stage).
WHITEBOX (the Lab) is a gallery displaying creative science and material inquiry; foregrounding biomaterials, chemical processes, and physical transformation in formation.
BLACKBOX (the Stage) is a stage performing new media fictions; staging immersive, time-based experiences that shape perception.
Artifacts are crafted documents designed to interact with their surrounding systems. We highlight artifacts over the identity or platform of the artist. This way we focus on the contextual relevance of the artifact, which informs the curatorial to function as an authentic relational and narrative-driven world.