Ninefold Turns Recycled 3D Printing Waste into Sound and Light Field

The installation titled Ninefold: A Distributed Resonant Field converts discarded 3D printing waste into nine massive resonant objects that shape sound, light, and spatial experience. Developed by architect Hyojin Kwon, founder of Pre- and Post-, percussionist and composer Jeremy Muller, and material researcher Misri Patel, the project bridges architecture, music, computation, and digital fabrication.

The workflow utilizes discarded PLA gathered from fabrication laboratories. The material is shredded into pellets, blended with virgin material, and reprinted into nine large artifacts using pellet-based additive manufacturing. Rather than hiding recycled elements, the fabrication process highlights variations in transparency, opacity, color, and layered deposition across surfaces to register material transformation.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

The nine forms emerge from a shared computational system utilizing reaction-diffusion algorithms. Instead of a single repeating geometry, the system produces evolving shapes that expand, contract, and twist. Each object acts as a resonant body tuned to a specific harmonic frequency, forming a distributed sound field where audio sources disperse throughout the installation rather than concentrating in one point.