Liminal States and the MakerLabs Tools for Change Residency!
November 3, 2025
Liminal States is an evolving sound and video installation built around the spaces between things — between sound and silence, self and other, motion and stillness.
At its foundation are eight original compositions by Lara Kroeker (Mel-lif-lu-ous), each a movement on a distinct threshold of experience. Layering violin, voice, and harmonic textures, these pieces form a living architecture of sound that listens and responds to the presence of its audience.
Scattered throughout the space is a constellation of sensor-based sound boxes — quiet, sculptural vessels equipped with microphones, light, and touch sensors. Each one listens for subtle gestures: a breath, a hum, a fingertip brushing metal. These traces of human presence are captured and transformed in real time through Ableton Live, where they are granulated, stretched, and folded into the evolving compositions.
Video projections accompany each piece, extending sound into light and movement — a visual echo of the music’s breath. Each video is pre-rendered and played through the Visibox system, triggered directly by MIDI cues from Ableton Live. The videos unfold in time with the compositions, shifting gently as the music evolves. Together, sound and image form a simple, synchronized environment — an immersive space that breathes in rhythm with the music, inviting the audience to slow down, listen, and be present.
Liminal States is not a static album, but a cycle of crossings — a meditation on impermanence and transformation. Each composition exists as a threshold: fragile, shifting, unresolved. Together, they form a single, continuous breath stretched across time — a body of sound suspended between worlds.
Ultimately, Liminal States is a choreography of interaction — an audiovisual system in which every gesture, every sound, becomes part of an evolving field of resonance. It is not about revelation, but connection — the invisible exchange between breath and circuit, sound and silence, person and space.
At its core, it’s an album suspended between worlds, compositions gently dissolving into the air around it.
Interaction:
Light and breath sensors respond to proximity. As visitors lean near or breathe toward the box, violin harmonics awaken, gradually brightening the soundscape.
Experience:
The room feels alive to presence — each motion or breath an act of creation, each pause a return to stillness. Participants awaken the composition as if coaxing dawn from darkness.
Visuals:
Projected particles of golden light expand with each breath, scattering across the walls like the first rays of sun breaking through shadow.
Interaction:
Ultrasonic sensors detect the distance of bodies in motion, blurring or sharpening the mix as participants move. Each approach reveals tone and definition; each retreat dissolves it into granular haze.
Experience:
Moving slowly through Fog turns listening into navigation — a dance between visibility and obscurity where uncertainty becomes part of the rhythm.
Visuals:
Mist and light projections drift across the space, refracting color and form. Silhouettes melt into one another, transforming every step into an ephemeral performance.
Interaction:
Heart-rate and breath sensors transform biological rhythms into loops of voice and violin, their timing stretching and contracting with each visitor’s natural pulse.
Experience:
Participants rest beneath a canopy of dim light, their own heartbeat shaping the structure of the music. The body becomes both metronome and dreamer.
Visuals:
Soft, glowing color fields pulse in slow rhythm with the visitors’ breathing — a quiet choreography of light tied to the sound of life itself.
Interaction:
Piezo microphones embedded in resonant tubes record hums, sighs, or faint tones, which are delayed and reintroduced as distant harmonies within the evolving composition.
Experience:
The installation listens more than it speaks. Visitors hear their own traces reappear moments or minutes later, woven into the space’s collective resonance.
Visuals:
Light ripples outward in concentric waves, fading like the surface of water disturbed by something unseen — illumination shaped by sound energy.
Interaction:
Capacitive touch sensors detect skin contact between participants. Each connection triggers harmonic tones and low vibrations that pulse through conductive surfaces.
Experience:
The installation only sings when people touch. Sound, vibration, and warmth merge to reveal a simple truth: resonance is shared.
Visuals:
Projected textures of skin, water, and heartbeat ripple outward with every connection. Light glows softly, amplifying the warmth of human presence.
A line of light divides what was from what will be. To cross it is to alter the sound forever — a quiet act of transformation.
Interaction:
Infrared sensors embedded in a glowing archway detect movement and direction, triggering subtle shifts in harmony and tone each time someone steps through.
Experience:
Visitors enact transformation through movement; the act of crossing becomes compositional, each step leaving a trace of change for all who follow.
Visuals:
Projected light cascades across the arch in layers of evolving color. Every crossing adds to the visual memory — an accumulation of transitions recorded in hue.
Sound bends like light through glass. What seems solid flickers into illusion, and the body becomes part of a shifting reflection.
Interaction:
Gyroscopes and motion sensors capture gesture, translating it into panning, pitch bends, and spectral modulation. The sound moves around the listener, always almost within reach.
Experience:
Participants sculpt the intangible — shaping invisible frequencies with the sweep of an arm or the turn of a wrist. The more one chases the sound, the further it drifts.
Visuals:
Mirrored projections fragment the visitor’s reflection into ghostly doubles. Refracted light and color ripple through the space, erasing the border between real and imagined.
Everything converges. The installation exhales — a single, sustained breath made from all that has been left behind.
Interaction:
All prior recordings feed into a central system that continually blends them into a living drone. Every new gesture reshapes this collective resonance.
Experience:
Standing in Return feels like being held within the memory of the space itself — the sound of everyone who came before, still gently alive.
Visuals:
A central sculpture pulses with layered light, shifting with the density of accumulated sound. Fragments of earlier projections merge into one slow, breathing composition — the final echo of connection.
