During their residency at Mediamatic’s Haptic Lab, artist duo sikau/pubalova developed vocal fold tension mismatch, an installation combining soft robotic latex membranes with bone-conduction sound. The work explores how touch and listening can happen without direct contact, and how proximity, vibration and bodily sensation shape our encounter with an artwork.
We spoke with Lea and Denisa about listening beyond the ear, remote sensing, soft robotics, intimacy and the ideas feeding into the work.
→ Read more about the installation vocal fold tension mismatch
At this stage in the process, how would you describe vocal fold tension mismatch to someone encountering it for the first time?
s/p: vocal fold tension mismatch stages wrinkling patterns in two different sceneries: once in a window front, the other on a posthuman futon. We work with soft robotics membranes made from latex that shrink and expand. You can listen to these wrinkles as if you were inside of them through bone-conduction chairs. A palette of sound textures, from mumbling to screeching, are translated directly to your skull and elicit a haptic, inner listening.
What did you want to explore through vocal fold tension mismatch that you hadn’t been able to approach in your previous work?
s/p: We were curious about haptics without direct touch of object, the translation of touch, or remote sensing that might feel even stronger than direct contact with the object itself. The second dimension that we aimed at exploring in our haptics lab residency was soft robotics, specifically pneumatic (air-driven) mechanisms.
In this work, listening happens partly through bone conduction: sound reaches the visitor through the chin and the bones of the face. What becomes possible when listening is no longer primarily an act of the ear?
s/p: Listening never was primarily an act of the ear, but our use of language and the canons around hearing might have led us into that direction.We try to trouble this understanding by experimenting with multisensory environments, from individual cocoons to collective immersive soundscapes, smellscapes, touchscapes, that affect us in weird ways. In this work, the fold becomes vocal, sounding via vibration.
Amos Peled working on vocal fold tension mismatch by sikau/pubalova August 2026 -
Visitors can sit with it and listen through it. Your installations repeatedly remove some of the usual distance between artwork and visitor. How do you think about intimacy when designing these encounters?
s/p: In our practice, we work with the concept of “touchgrounds” which we sketch as playgrounds for touching, via sound, vibration and tactile encounters. For the two “touchgrounds” of vocal fold tension mismatch, we were interested in remote sensing and to experiment with different stagings of the visitor. We tried how audiences would listen when standing, kneeling or sitting, and how it changes the encounter with the installation. This performative staging also speaks to different layers of intimacy: the skull- conducted listening to the inner folds of the installation alongside being seated next to the artwork and at times not being able to touch it. So, there is a convolution of closeness, proximity and remoteness, especially in the futon installation.
Denis Połec working on vocal fold tension mismatch by sikau/pubalova August 2026 -
So much contemporary technology promises to filter bodies and environments for us: cancelling noise, removing friction, optimising attention. Here you seem to do the opposite and amplify what would normally be filtered out. What interests you about that reversal?
s/p: We sink into multisensory noise every moment, from Gaussian noise of image generation to urban soundscapes. Meanwhile, the idea to hush our environments, to sonically control them, is not at all new, it has been part of historic tales since centuries, long before Orpheus drowned the sirens lure in counter-song. Today, ASMR’s micro-sonic whispers and taps soothes our nervous systems, steepened, drowned in texture.
Our practice is shaped by incommensurabilities, frictions between two or more phenomena that cannot translate, causing all sorts of humorous, weird, or discomforting emotions. In this work we were interested to playfully haptically amplify this mismatch in tension.
Finally, what are you currently reading, watching, listening to, or researching that is feeding into vocal fold tension mismatch? Are there particular works, thinkers, or references that have been staying with you while developing the project?
s/p: Within this residency, our collaboration with Amos Peled, who experiments with soft robotics, surgery theatres and eerily animated organs, has had a profound impact on the versatility of the wrinkling, as well as the aesthetics of the final installations. In terms of readings, we are particularly struck by the book Parallel Minds of our mentor, Dr. Laura Tripaldi. She sketches how the material defines the form and character of intelligence and explores softness as a possibility for futuring technologies in feminist and post-colonial environments.
This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
Interview took place September, 2026