2022–ongoing · Real-time audiovisual series · Unreal Engine 4
The CONV
An ongoing audiovisual series built around a shared sound-driven particle system.
The CONV is an ongoing audiovisual series built around a shared sound-driven system. Across the works, the underlying behaviour changes very little: particles gather, detach, disperse, collide and reorganise in response to the same, or closely related, sonic structure. What changes is the body through which this behaviour becomes visible.
The series does not approach sound simply as information to be visualised. Sound functions instead as an invisible force: something that cannot itself be seen, but whose presence becomes perceptible through the disturbance it produces in matter.
This relationship is deliberately kept constant from one work to another. By transferring almost the same motion into different bodies, the work asks how strongly context determines what we believe we are seeing. A movement that appears purely physical in an unidentified mass may begin to resemble thought, memory, intention or consciousness when it occurs inside a human head.
Nothing in the underlying system has necessarily become more alive. The transformation may instead take place in the viewer.
The CONV therefore sits between audiovisual composition, simulation and perception. Its central question is not simply what does sound look like?, but:
And when an object responds to an invisible force, how quickly do we begin to imagine that something inside it is listening, thinking, remembering, or alive?
The CONV I — Matter
The first work begins with an unidentified body.
It resembles matter, but refuses a stable identity: at different moments it may appear geological, biological, architectural or animate. A dense accumulation of particles forms a temporary body inside an almost empty space. Under the pressure of sound, this body stretches, contracts, releases fragments and partially loses its boundaries.
The sonic structure does not illustrate an external narrative. It behaves more like a field acting upon the object.
The body becomes visible through its response.
Because the object carries no recognisable biological identity, its motion remains ambiguous. What we see may simply be matter undergoing force. Yet as the movements become coordinated, turbulent or seemingly purposeful, another possibility begins to appear: viewers may start to attribute behaviour to something that is, technically, only a system.
The work stays deliberately at this threshold.
The CONV II — Interior
The second work retains almost the same underlying audiovisual logic, but transfers it into a radically different body.
A human head appears partially opened. Its visible surface gives way to an unstable internal structure: lines, fragments, particles and streams gather inside it and escape into the surrounding space.
The technical behaviour remains closely related to the first work, yet its meaning changes immediately.
Movement that previously appeared material now becomes difficult not to read psychologically. Accumulation, dispersion and turbulence become open to psychological readings: memory, thought, anxiety, excitation or mental activity. Fragments leaving the head may be interpreted as ideas, information, consciousness or the loss of an internal order.
The work does not claim that these particles represent consciousness.
Instead, it asks why the presence of a human body causes us to interpret essentially abstract motion in this way.
The human head changes how the same movement is read. The same kind of movement that was previously attributed to matter is suddenly understood as having an interior.
What has changed?
The system?
The object?
Or the viewer's willingness to imagine that there is something inside?
Taken together, Matter and Interior form two states of the same underlying proposition.
One presents motion before it has a clearly identifiable subject.
The other places similar motion inside the human figure, where physical behaviour becomes almost impossible to separate from psychological interpretation.
The CONV uses repetition as a method: by keeping the audiovisual mechanism relatively stable while changing its embodiment, the series shows how meaning also depends on the body to which we believe the motion belongs.
The CONV
- Initial year
- 2022
- Status
- Ongoing series
- Form
- Real-time audiovisual work
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
- Visual system
- Sound-driven real-time 3D particle system
- Works
- Matter (2022) · Interior (2026)
- Artist
- Liu Hao