“A Sound Experiment, Lily & Billy

A Sound Experiment, Lily & Billy 2025

Object Type: Performance, Sound, Video

Medium: Goldfish, oxygen bottle, bowl, glass jar, contact mic, suona, readymade toys, Pocket Operator, tambourine
Link: https://youtu.be/9g6XJWzXtpQ?si=PF0mDR4HtsaYnSUw

On May 17, 2025, I staged a performance with two goldfish—Lily and Billy—situated at a table cluttered with objects. The premise was simple and absurd: to make the fish speak. Before I began, the audience received a small sheet of text, a fabricated story of my past conversations with the fish and their sudden silence. The question was planted: can we make them speak again?
Using a karaoke mic, I retold the story aloud, then cycled through instruments, toys, and objects, sounding toward the fish. The action hovered between sincerity and parody, between speaking to and speaking through. Some sound artists later remarked that the fish seemed to resonate, swimming closer when vibrations reached them; others accused the act of cruelty. But the performance hinged less on knowing the fish’s reaction than on observing the audience’s belief. Faced with uncertain signals, listeners had to decide: do they trust the fiction, the vibrations, or their own projections?
In the room, another layer unfolded. The hum of the air conditioner merged with my sounds, yet louder still was the audience’s silence. Their stillness —unsmiling, rigid—generated an “unusual energy” peculiar to sound performance, where quiet is ritualized as attentiveness. I wondered: why must audiences erase their own noises, fidgeting, or laughter, as though sound art were sacred? Then laughter broke through. As I stood, jumped, sat still, hesitated, or moved abruptly, the audience began to mirror this openness, sensing permission to reconstruct their own timelines. My gestures did not dictate but invited; their subtle responses—laughter, shifts of posture, exchanged glances—revealed how performative energy circulates and liberates. In this mutual play, the performance exposed how listening bodies are disciplined by normative spaces—white cubes, theatres, classrooms, clinics, even jails—yet also how those same bodies can unlearn silence and reclaim agency through shared everydayness.
Caught inside this atmosphere, I wanted to explore its possibility. I shouted at the fish: “Have you had dinner yet?” ( ). I leapt from the floor, repeating the phrase with each thud of my landing: “Have. You. Had. Dinner. Yet?” The gesture broke the frame, collapsing the boundary between staged action and ordinary impulse. For a moment, I felt less like a performer inside a contrived scenario and more like a body insisting on normality—on interacting with fish & toys, moving, living.
The work revealed how performance time is not neutral but charged: an intensive time without delay, produced by serial actions, improvisations, and interruptions. These moments oscillate between open and closed systems, between inclusion and exclusion, depending on how the artist negotiates internal intention and external reception. What emerged was less a conversation with fish than an experiment in listening, belief, and silent authority.
ASTROJOKE asked: what happens when we take the everydayness ( )—interaction with non human, objects, the desire to speak—and insert it into the solemn frame of sound performance? Can everydayness liberate us from ritualized seriousness? And why, when we listen so intently, does everything suddenly feel so strange, so unusually real?