Cascaded Development is an experiential acoustic exploration of the halls of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin through Plato’s concept of Khôra. Khôra is an ancient Greek word coined by Plato as a term for space, receptacle or site. He proposed that Khôra is a space that holds no characteristics in itself and that cannot permanently contain anything but bodiless, ephemeral, time based media and which reflects the character of the medium passing through. Drawing an analogy between such media and sound, the installation thematizes Khôra as an object of acoustic investigation.

The artist transposes this idea to the AdK’s interconnected rooms on the ground floor and challenges us to understand the space solely through an auditive illumination. Daisuke Ishida uses a process of pink noise, which carries an equal amount of noise power in each octave, and further 16 descending sine wave sweeps to excite the space via a wave field synthesis system in a linear set up, opposed to a traditional circular one. This will reveal the resonance frequencies of the rooms which then will be foregrounded to make them experienceable. These collected sounds and their reflections will disclose the unapparent acoustic properties of the rooms.