Aki Onda's Wave Spaces
Text by Marcus Boon
Published in the brochure for Aki Onda’s exhibition “Middle Of A Moment” at The Substation, Newport, Australia, 2025
Image: Aki Onda Cosmos (2025)
We live in a universe made of waves. In physics, the three most discussed types of waves are mechanical waves, electro-magnetic waves, and quantum waves. Sound is a mechanical wave. Light is an electro-magnetic wave. Physical matter is a condensed quantum wave. As diverse as they can be, wave-based phenomena hold certain formal characteristics in common: periodicity; polarity; emergence from/in a field; and contingency in relation to an active energy input. Wave-based phenomena can also be defined by other related characteristics, such as the patterns of interference and harmonics that result from the superposition of waves at a particular point, or the diffraction of waves in response to an obstacle or change in the structure of the wave space. American physicist Richard Feynman described this space, just the everyday space of a room we might find ourselves in. as being similar to a swimming pool, full of waves, after someone has dived into it, only instead of the rippling of the water, there are light waves, bouncing around, which form the basis of our seeing the room. And many other waves too:
In this space there is not only my vision of you, but information from Moscow Radio that's being broadcasted at the present moment and the seeing of somebody from Peru. All the radio waves are just the same kind of waves, only longer waves. And then the radar from the airplane, which is looking at the ground trying to figure out where it is, is coming through this room at the same time. Plus the x-rays, and cosmic rays, and all these other things, the same kind of waves, exactly the same waves, but shorter, faster, or longer, slower, exactly the same thing. So this big field, this area of irregular motions of an electric field of vibration contains this tremendous information and IT'S ALL REALLY THERE, that's what gets you!
(quoted in Kahn, Earth Sound, Earth Signal, 10)
We can therefore propose the idea of a generalized “wave space” and of waves as an artistic medium. While the mathematics and physics of such spaces are well established in their fields, the lived experience of such spaces and waves remains relatively unexplored. In adapting to wave spaces and building cultures and practices around them, human beings (and nonhumans too) develop particular “forms of life” – that is, forms of attunement and relation. Art is one such form of attunement – or, if you like, an open and expanding set of modes of attunement.
Aki Onda's multidisciplinary art has been exploring how to attune and what can be attuned to since his groundbreaking Cassette Memories(2004-ongoing), which involves environmental cassette recordings that date back to the late 1980s. At first, Cassette Memories appears to be a sound art project, in which Onda improvises with an array of field recordings, which he loops into dense fields of sound. At the same time, Onda views Cassette Memoriesas an electroacoustic practice of seeking out "not the sound of the space itself, but the overtone, reflections… [and] echoes of the space." Onda is speculatively reaching out to the environment through the sonic traces of other environments, which call forth something new but at the same time inherent to the space itself as we experience it – and the entities, human and nonhuman, that find themselves in that space. Performed in locations around the world, the same recordings achieve something new and contingent to each location, "spirits known and unknown", to use the title of another of Onda's works. Listened to as an archival project, Cassette Memories resonates with 2014, a year of 365 daily cassette recordings, a durational work in the spirit of Tehching Hsieh. With duration condensing into the retentional system of cassettes, the work asks “what does a year sounds like?” – what are the electromagnetic traces, captured onto the cassette tape.
What kinds of waves are we talking about here? In his book Sonic Bodies, British sound theorist Julian Henriques articulates three bandwidths of vibration in his analysis of the Stone Love Movement sound system and of Jamaican sound system cultures more generally. First, there is the material bandwidth of physical sound and the various instruments and speakers and other objects that generate the vibration that we call sound. Next, there is the corporeal bandwidth, meaning the ways in which human bodies move in producing and responding to the material sounds that fill the space of a sonic session. Also, there is the socio-cultural bandwidth, whereby those who participate in a sound system session bring knowledge, expectations, ways of socializing and being together that inform how people interact in the dance. Henriques' model is not only applicable to sound system sessions. It applies to everything from the opera house to the Moroccan gnawa lila, to a drone installation such as in La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House. It can be applied to Aki Onda's work as well, but part of the originality of Onda's work is that it suggests a fourth bandwidth, a speculative one, nonetheless composed of waves which Onda tunes into across so much of his work across different media. Waves leave traces, and in some cases, waves are a trace. Traces are waves, something that we can tune into and receive as a transmission, whether cosmic, historical, spiritual or otherwise.
Nam June's Spirit Was Speaking to Me (2017/2022) is Onda’s series of recordings and installations that seeks to tune into the frequencies of the groundbreaking Korean media artist Nam June Paik, who died in 2006. Onda recalls the genesis of the project:
"The project began with my unexpected exposure to ethereal messages. I was listening to a mundane music show on a radio program with a Sony handheld radio in Seoul, South Korea in 2010. Suddenly, the signal switched to a murmured voice with strange electromagnetic frequency patterns. I felt strong sensations and believed that those were spiritual communication with Nam June Paik, though I had no idea what that meant. Over the next several years, I received three more messages in different cities on multiple continents. Why was Paik speaking to me? That was the question I asked myself that led me to research on spiritualism and mediumship, which eventually developed into an art project... When I caught the message, it was a shamanic experience, inducing a strong trance state. This was not a surprise, as Paik was known for his association with Korean shamanism – a practice that surfaced in his works throughout his career."
(Leyva and Obón interview, 12)
Onda connects the piece to Paik's interests in Korean shamanism and in the way Paik worked with global electronic media as a field of speculative shamanic activity. Shamanism, whether the Korean or Amazonian kind, often has a strong sonic aspect, but the sound is understood as a way of sensing, probing, or calling forth spirits, of unravelling and rebuilding the energy matrices, natural and historical, which constitute our lived environments, and thereby also potentially a way of healing and addressing individual and collective wounds. Onda reaches out to what is there but unheard, bringing it into the field of awareness.
Waves condensing into matter is a significant idea for Onda's work. His installation/performance piece Bells (2021) is built around a collection of glass, ceramic and clay hand bells, which are displayed in a gallery space. At times the bells may be picked up and performed with by selected musicians, and at other times, the bells present themselves as a condensation of the sound into an object, bringing with them the imagination of sounds past:
"In some ancient traditions, bells were instruments of the gods, and their sounds carried sacred spirits and messages. Since then, bells have been used for announcing the beginning or ending of an event or giving some other alert or warning. In terms of this installation, each bell once belonged to individuals or groups and may have been played or served as decoration or both. I’m interested in the personal and collective memories of bells and integrating them. Ringing or imagining the sonority of the bells recall sounds and histories that would otherwise be lost and invisible. The objects tell messages to me."
(Leyva and Obón interview, 12)
These echoes recall the early work of Onda's friend and mentor, Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki. For his "Self Studies" from the 1960s, Suzuki would look for places in the natural environment where a sound would naturally result in an echo, such as a valley. Suzuki called this a practice of "throwing and following" (「なげかけ」と「たどり」) – and it is a practice that usefully describes Onda's work too. Onda has radically expanded the kinds of sounds that one might throw and follow, including audio recordings, and he has --also expanded beyond sound into light, as with the performance piece Reflections and Repercussions(2018-ongoing), in which Onda improvises with a variety of light sources, throwing light out into a particular environment/space and following it, playing with it and literally "seeing what happens" – anything in the space might be illuminated or cast a shadow.
The concept of energy offers a way of linking light and sound as interrelated media – in a recent interview, Onda told me that "from the real beginning, I had a clear idea that I’m sending energy, not just sound." He playfully connects this sending of energy to his father, Masashi Onda, a "genius field hockey player", of Korean descent, but who played for the Japanese national team in the late '60s and participated in the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
"He could sense what’s happening during the game. He could think really systematically. He could foresee what was happening in the next moment. So he had a psychic power. People called it a psychic power. But I understood, it’s also a system of logic. Because he knows the game so well. And this was not just simply about playing ball with sticks. He was thinking about other conditions. It can be weather, it can be a player’s physical condition, it can be mood, or... the whole situation. Before a game, I once saw him start telling what would happen in the game and how they would win [laughs]. And it happened exactly as he said. He was kind of in a trance state."
(Boon interview, 2019)
You can "throw" both sound waves and light waves, and you can follow them, just as a sportsperson throws a ball or makes a move, initiating a series of events. "Throwing" involves a release or movement of energy, causing a shift in the state of the field. The difference is that the sports person's actions are goal oriented, whereas the artist has a more open-ended goal, perhaps that of revealing what has not yet been perceived.
This practice takes us into Onda's most recent project, Cosmos (2025), which Onda describes as consisting of collage prints of "emulsion-coated dry glass plate photography, [which] was the standard of choice used by large astronomical observatories and surveys for documenting and imaging the sky. It's said [that] more than 2.4 million glass plates were made in North America alone. These observations with optical telescopes traced 23 million light-years of intergalactic space – an enormous electromagnetic field. Lights as a transmission medium." Although there is a history of astronomically-oriented painting, such as the stunning paintings of Vija Celmins, Onda's work here is again focuses on a new kind of "cassette memory", with traces of stellar light recorded and remembered on dry glass plates. That the form was abandoned in the 1970s amplifies the magic of the "recently outmoded" that Walter Benjamin discussed in relation to the Paris arcades and other abandoned forms of textual and image-based archive – a magic that opens up as the commodity form leaves the object – or in this case, the scientific value, leaving a vast archive of recordings of stellar light, historical but forgotten, stunningly complex and beautiful and real.
If indeed we are living in a universe of waves, nonetheless particular waves appear and disappear in the most utterly contingent way in "the middle of the moment" that constitute the now. Onda's work explores how we might speculatively engage with these waves, revealing them and their traces that they leave, whether light or sound, or recordings of them.
Bibliography
Boon, Marcus, "Interview with Aki Onda", unpublished, 2019.
Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. University of California Press, 2013.
Henriques, Julian. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Soundsystems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing.London: Continuum, 2011.
Cinthya Garcia Leyva and Martha Riva Palacio Obón, "Intangible Archives: Interview with Aki Onda", in Spirits in Frequencies: Aki Onda. Mexico City: Casa del Lago UNAM, 2023.