DEBORA.STUDIO: NOISE TO SIGNAL: EXCERPTS FROM TRANSDUCING BUILDINGS, SYSTEMS, AND STRUCTURES

One of six installations for the online exhibition by winners of the 2025 League Prize.

June 10, 2025

Deborah Garcia’s NOISE TO SIGNAL is a composition of extracts taken from her work in designing and producing architectural sound systems. Within her practice, her approach often involves recording buildings or structures, through which her interventions act as sonic conductors for amplification, remixing, and transformation. Showing moments from a series of projects, including a nine-foot-tall sound tower, a 60-foot-long folding wall, a three-month-long soundtrack, and a 15-minute 87,000 square foot sonic exhale—these activations flow within a larger meditation on the living systems of the built environment: systems for ventilation, pressure, energy, and power. The soundtrack featured in NOISE TO SIGNAL consists of recorded ventilation from the Columbus Public Library and echoing fan sounds triggered while interacting with the SUPA System, highlighting the ever-present sonic noise of the built environment that so often spills into our lives in both subtle and loud ways. How might sound operate as a tool for disruption and recalibration, allowing us to become more agile agents and participants of change within, what so often feel like, unmovable systemic conditions?

Credits

About the SUPA System:

SUPA System is a sonic sculpture by Joseph Zeal-Henry with designer Deborah Garcia. As spatial practitioners and designers, they explore music and sound as materials for constructing physical spaces.

The SUPA System was commissioned by ArtLab and the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA). It was made possible with the Johnson-Kulukundis Family President’s Fund for Arts at Harvard University. 

Read about the project in Wallpaper magazine’s article “Joseph Zeal-Henry and Deborah Garcia’s SUPA System is a ‘manifesto made physical.’”

About RESPONDER:

RESPONDER is a sound installation and architectural narrative that focuses on conducting the unique voice of the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library. Every evening, programmed to synchronize with sundown, the library was awakened for a 15-minute ‘sigh.’ Its architectural shiftings—the vibration of steel, the soft murmur of brick, the sizzle of electrical wires, and the hum of ventilation—were transmuted into a therapeutic sound designed to wash over the sunken courtyard of the Children’s Entrance, providing an immersive sonic pool.

The project was designed and implemented as part of Exhibit Columbus and was made possible with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, The MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology, and Columbus Propellor.

Read more about the project on the Exhibit Columbus website.