In Jingchao Yang’s Ignition (2025), the sound serves as the work’s primary organising logic. The piece opens on an ostensibly pastoral landscape — lush grass, a goat grazing, and wind swiftly moving through the trees. Rather abruptly, the vibrant hue of the screen collapses to black and white, and the scene pivots into a world of industrialisation and extraction filled with cranes, power plants and thick smoke. The transition is not only visual but also sonic. An artificial, unsettlingly melodic voice sings. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do…” The eerie tunes of Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two) (1892) signal the shift from the ecological to the industrial, the natural to the man-made.
The selection of this tune is historically loaded, hinting at a specific moment of the relationship between the man and the machine in history. The popular vaudeville-era song was the first piece of music rendered through computer speech synthesis, performed in 1961 by computer scientists Carol Lochbaum and John Kelly in collaboration with electronic music composer Max Matthews.1 This was the first instance of a machine ‘to sing’. Yang deploys this specific tune as a symbol indexing the technology that began to mimic the human.
Alongside the strategic use of sound to shape the narratives, Yang also implements a structure of perpetual juxtaposition. Ignition operates across a split-screen format, holding two temporal registers simultaneously in tension. A world prior to human intervention, filled with the sounds of the bird chirping, the whistles of the wind, and the rippling river, stands in stark contrast to the one colonised by industrial infrastructure. Its soundscape is a disorienting cacophony of clanking, whirring, rattling and beeping sounds of machines. Yet the mechanical rhythm is void of living beings. While the split screen and repeated transitions demonstrate two distinct worlds, they are ultimately a single world in successive states of transformation. Landscapes are completely transformed by rapid urbanisations; grandiose verdant valleys are penetrated by tunnels and bridges; mountains that once soared into the sky are gradually submerged due to the rising sea levels; flocks of animals on grass fields are replaced by wind turbines.
However, Yang does not entirely erase humans from the industrial, somewhat dystopian world. Instead, they are displaced. A humanoid machine, a robot — uncannily suggestive of human form and behaviour, resides in the posthuman world. It does not directly engage with the world nor contribute as a labourer in the system, while the cranes lift and the power plants generate energy. It occupies a space hinting at the obsolescence of the human. Through the humanoid figure, Yang stages the uncomfortable irony of how humans are rendered redundant in a system they have constructed. Two worlds in Ignition is not a radical fiction, but a plausible speculation on how the anthropogenic world would unfold, where humans are eventually omitted from the frame.
Written by Kahyun Lee
1 Julius O. Smith III, Physical Audio Signal Processing: For Virtual Musical Instruments and Digital Audio Effects (W3K Publishing, 2011), 453.
