About the Artist:
Shan Lyu is a London-based Chinese artist, writer, and music producer whose multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of sound, space, and information systems. With a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London, she combines creative writing, sonic composition, and interactive installation to investigate how spatial structures shape perception and how information circulates within social and cultural contexts.
Shan has participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally in Shanghai, Beijing and London. Her music installation has been exhibited recently in Ealing Blues Festival. Her writing and sound-based works have been published in journals such as Limit Experience (NY) and Indelible by the London Arts-Based Research Centre. Rooted in both artistic inquiry and cultural research, her work invites audiences into immersive environments that engage with the sensorial and conceptual dimensions of lived experience.
Artist Statement:
The video explores the sonic dimension of global mobility, tracing how human journeys radiate from cities and expand across diverse landscapes. Air travel, often treated as a mundane routine, becomes here a site of collective rhythm and cultural resonance. The invisible infrastructures of flight—routes, signals, and coordinates—form a hidden architecture of connection that sustains the movement of people, languages, and ideas.
On 24 October, at 14:22pm, I captured all flight routes along the latitude of London. The resulting dotted lines trace a circular map—a panoramic score of synchronised human motion. These trajectories, mapped onto a piano roll within composition software, transform data into notation: traffic becomes melody, routes turn into rhythm. The sky becomes both score and instrument, translating the architectures of travel into sound.
Through this transformation, infrastructure is reimagined as a living organism whose pulse mirrors the intensities of movement across the planet. Listening becomes an act of witnessing: an invitation to hear the density of transportation as a chorus of collective experience. The work transforms the global network of flight into a shared musical identity—an unseen symphony of journeys that transcend borders and languages, resonating with the plural voices of our interconnected world.
