2024 – ongoing
kinetic sound installation
with kind support from SKE Fonds, Stadt Wien, BMWKMS Austria, BMEIA Austria
Next exhibitions: NM in Sankt Ruprecht Vienna, Austria (5.2027), SP_CE Austrian Non-Profit Organisation for Art and Transdisciplinarity Vienna, Austria (5.2026) and GMEA residency – Centre National de Creation Musicale Albi, France (7.2026)
Past exhibition: Heritage Art Space, Vietnam (1.2026)
Past residencies and presentations: Alte Schmiede Vienna Austria (11.2025), Paradise AIR Matsudo Japan (7.2025), Uncool AIR in Poschiavo Switzerland (5.2025)
Drone & Drone is a kinetic sound installation for 16 pairs of Vietnamese wind-driven flutes that is conceived and developed by artist group Siedl/Cao. This work centers around “drone” – both as a pilotless aircraft i.e. the future of warfare and at the same time “drone” as a healing sustaining sound that can be found in many ancient cultures worldwide such as Gregorian chant, Australian indigenous music, Buddhist monk chanting, Mongolian Tuvan singing, etc. Drone & Drone invites contemplation on the dual nature of humanity—the potential to create beauty, goodness, and transcendence while also possessing the power to destroy both the world and ourselves.
Not many people know that some of the earliest unmanned drones were used by the American army during the Vietnam war, primarily for military observation, electronic warfare, decoy missions and in psychological warfare. On the contrary the aeolian flutes used in this installation come from a long-standing and still vibrant tradition of singing kite-flutes in Vietnam, which symbolises people’s hope for peace and prosperity.
From a technical perspective, Drone & Drone installation is also a psychoacoustic experiment where several phenomena are at play simultaneously: acoustic beating – slow pulsation between two slightly detuned pair of flutes; combination tones – intermodulation tones that are not physically present in the air but are perceived in the inner ear because of its non-linear physiology; and the Doppler effect, which subtly bends pitch as the flutes rotate, stretching and compressing frequency in real time. The installation operates at the threshold between physics and perception, where objective waveforms entangle with subjective construction. How these phenomena interact with each other, and how they affect our perception, emotion and psychology remains as a subjective, mysterious and discreet experience for each visitor.
This project had its debut at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi, Vietnam (1.2025) and has been further developed during the Uncool artist residency in Switzerland (6.2025) and Paradise artist residency in Japan (7.2025). It can be exhibited as a scalable self-running kinetic sound installation.
Siedl/Cao 