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Guizhou, a mountainous region in Southwest China, has undergone significant terraforming processes and infrastructural development over the past decade to establish itself as a Big Data Hub, not without ethical and ecological costs.

In Cloud of Polyphony the 5G cell tower has been inverted and reappropriated, shifting it from a device that captures and collects data into a speaker. Utilising a Lidar sensor to gather proximity data from visitors, it generates an unfolding soundscape based on onsite recordings in Guizhou, ranging from conversations in the local dialect to crumbling rocks, turbines, and electronic noise.

Through this multi-threaded narrative exploring the political and cultural dimensions of the data industry, Cloud of Polyphony highlights the material conditions associated with the ostensibly poetic concept of ‘the cloud’.

Hanchen Zhang is a research-based designer, recently graduating cum laude from the Master’s in Geo-Design programme at Design Academy Eindhoven.

His practice embraces sensorial interventions across sound, moving images, objects, and installations. Hanchen’s research explores the entanglements between emerging innovations, ecology, and social forces, focusing on how data infrastructure shapes social structures and accessibility. He investigates systematic value theories and design logics within both natural and built environments, offering a nuanced reflection on technoculture through an assemblage of aesthetic, historical, and philosophical frameworks. His work generates polyphonic narratives, weaving together theories, fiction, field recordings, and poetry to amplify or offset one another. Images, sounds, and data transcend their original forms, embodying new materialities–from digital fractures to architectural artefacts.