Listening to the Stones
Listening to the Stones is an interactive installation that seeks to evoke untold, forgotten, or imagined stories through sound and the tactile experience of touching and playing with stones. I trained a custom detection model on six stones collected by my two-year-old toddler in Limehouse. This model enables recognition of these stones when placed under a camera. The audience can move them around, assemble them in different ways, and in doing so generate sounds and form compositions. The sounds are intentionally abstract, yet they suggest narratives. The work acknowledges stories that remain hidden and invites imaginative, speculative engagements.
In the ever-expanding and changing landscapes of Limehouse and Canary Wharf, stones endure as quiet, constant presences—often overlooked. In widely used object detection datasets, such as the COCO Dataset (Common Objects in Context), stones are absent from the 80 object categories. The work asks what we neglect and exclude in our understandings of the present and our imaginations of the future. It hopes to create space for subtle expressions and for envisioning different futures through acts of play, discovery, and preservation.