Created by the team at Atelier Lozano-Hemmer, and located inside the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, one of Houston’s early underground reservoirs, Undercurrents is an installation that creates a seemingly endless “switchboard” of connections where participant voices are transformed into pulses of light that travel along branching paths.

Connected to this network are eight custom-made intercoms, each consisting of a microphone, a speaker, and a push button, placed at regular intervals along the perimeter. When a visitor presses an intercom button and speaks, their message is encoded into modulations of light brightness and visually transmitted along a path that may fork at any given cistern column (a “node”), bouncing and traveling steadily until it reaches another intercom, where it plays back slightly mixed with echoes of voices from the past.

While this is happening, an AI system looks for matching patterns in an archive of recordings, including commissioned poems by poets Nick Flynn, Aris Kian, Martha Serpas, Jennifer Teets, and Roberto Tejada. With each new voice, an “echo” is produced from this memory, so that each message carries traces of what came before. At any given time, up to twelve participants could be sending and receiving voice messages live, setting the cistern alight. If no one is participating, the installation begins to trigger itself automatically, as if dreaming, playing back curated voices and recalling earlier exchanges. A “timekeeper” wave of light is also periodically activated, scanning the entire space to clear any stranded messages.

Photos by: Nicki Evans

Undercurrents engages the cistern’s natural reverberation to suggest that communication is never neutral. It is shaped by space, perception, and history. The cistern becomes an audiovisual forum where fleeting expressions of presence—of being here, now, together—are made tangible.

Atelier Lozano-Hemmer

The project features over 420,000 light pixels, controlled by a single custom-made application. Eight custom-made intercom interactive stations include an outdoor microphone, a Bose speaker bar, and custom circuitry. One computer is running TouchDesigner along with custom Python software, using a media server, and DANTE sound protocol.

A mile-long network (1.4km) of light turns the cistern into a programmable topology. The system is designed to prioritise legibility of movement, propagation, and spatial drawing over image fidelity (conventional screen). The infrastructure operates at concert-scale complexity, allowing highly granular distributed behaviour across the network. It was designed so each segment can function as its own controllable node, enabling graph-like behaviours, sentence routing, and topological choreography. Using higher-voltage systems allowed longer strip runs, fewer injection points, reduced voltage drop, and simplified power distribution. Extensive AC daisy-chaining across underwater conditions (208V / 20A industrial-grade power architecture) pushed the project closer to infrastructure engineering than a conventional installation. Using Custom LED chip, fine-tuning PWM, dimming curves, refresh behavior, and flicker reduction elevated commodity LEDs into exhibition-grade media systems. Audio architecture (Dante network for 8 microphones + 16 output channels) functions as a parallel distributed system requiring synchronisation, QoS discipline, and robust switch behaviour. Sound becomes a generative force for light and spatial transformation rather than a separate medium.

Undercurrents is not just an artwork—it is a distributed environmental operating system where infrastructure, poetry, and computation converge.

Atelier Lozano-Hemmer

Separating semantic/audio classification from show-critical playback improved reliability, latency management, and computational specialisation (AI server + TouchDesigner server split).

A t-SNE-like sentence classification system maps meaning into architecture, transforming language into navigable coordinates. Visitors do not simply hear poetry—they move through a spatial field shaped by linguistic relationships. Graph traversal logic routes language, light, and meaning through the column network as visible migration. Audience speech becomes source material, feeding classification and reshaping the system dynamically.

The audience experiences emotion and immersion, while underneath lies a highly engineered fusion of networking, power, semantics, fabrication, and environmental control.

Project Page | Atelier Lozano-Hemmer | Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern

On view April 24, 2026 – January 24, 2027, The Water Works (105-B Sabine St, Houston, TX 77007, United States). Wednesday – Sunday, 10am – 5pm, Reservations are recommended.

Photos by: Nicki Evans