Forming Folds: Zeno van den Broek and the Architecture of the Digital

Format: CD (Limited to 100) and Digital
Label: Touch

“The street. The bedroom. The stairwell. The waiting room. The terminal. The interface. What do these spaces mean when seen through the prism of code, signal, and generated voice?”

Zeno van den Broek’s Forming Folds is not merely a composition – it is an exercise in expanded listening. It is a work that challenges the listener to inhabit a collapsing topology, where space and time are no longer fixed coordinates but malleable, recursive folds within the digital substrate. Across its four movements, Forming Folds explores the porous boundary between the human and post-human, mediated by AI, electromagnetic resonance, and the spectral textures of field recording.

The piece builds a metaphysical architecture: spaces are not described so much as evoked through sonic inference. AI-generated voices hover, at once intimate and uncanny, whispering a hybridised language composed from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and spatial analysis texts drawn from Wikipedia – two sources that are, respectively, poetic and empirical, phenomenological and encyclopaedic. The result is a form of language that feels neither entirely authored nor entirely artificial: a new syntax of space.

This synthetic voice does not narrate; it orients. It does not explain; it describes a condition. In this way, van den Broek invites us to navigate not a story, but a system – an infosphere of hidden rhythms and digital pulses.

A Spatial Encounter

The listening experience evokes, most directly, the durational installations of Bruce Nauman – especially Days (2009), in which disembodied voices intone the days of the week, forming a sculptural corridor of sound. Like Nauman’s piece, Forming Folds mobilises spatial perception through sonic placement, playing with the location and dislocation of the voice, the interplay between body and signal. It creates not a field of sound, but a condition of orientation. One listens with the body as much as with the ears.

There are echoes too of Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, where movement through space is guided and destabilised by pre-recorded cues. Both Cardiff and van den Broek use the voice as a marker of presence that dissolves its own authority, encouraging doubt in what is heard and what is known. In van den Broek’s hands, the voice becomes a carrier of new grammar – uncertain, elastic, machine-touched.

Olafur Eliasson’s influence may also be detected—not in tone, but in intent. As Eliasson constructs environments that allow us to become aware of perception itself, so too does van den Broek assemble layers of sound that make us question how we locate ourselves in space. Forming Folds does not provide answers; it provides stimuli for phenomenological awareness, auditory thresholds, and sensory feedback loops.

And if one is attuned to the structural, there are affinities with Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall – a grid of 1,500 tiny speakers emitting sine tones to create a physical, perceptual field. Like Perich, van den Broek deals in precision, calibration, and interference. The hums and glitches in Forming Folds are not incidental – they are composed residues, digital detritus reassembled as language.

Collapse and Continuity

In collapsing space and time into folds – into digitally mediated loops and overlaps – van den Broek gestures toward a post-human sonic consciousness. Here, listening becomes a form of mapping. A cartography of the intangible: the electromagnetic, the encoded, the algorithmically spliced.

But Forming Folds is not cold. It is not clinical. There is affect here. Not emotionality in the conventional sense, but a deeper kind of resonance—a feeling of being caught inside a system too vast to name, yet made briefly perceptible through sound.