This project challenges human-centered perception by using electromagnetic fields (EMF) as a lens to explore hidden interconnections. By transforming radio signals into sensory artifacts, the work reframes EMF not only as an invisible infrastructure but as a sacred mediator. Within a virtual “underground palace,” everyday gestures are ritualized into acts of reverence, inviting reflection on our dependence and position in a post-human era. The project is presented on New Art City, a browser-based platform for virtual exhibitions that allows audiences to experience immersive environments online without specialized hardware, extending accessibility and reach. More than a study of EMF itself, the project uses it as a medium to ask how humanity situates itself within an invisible yet interconnected world.

Electromagnetic fields (EMF) form an invisible infrastructure that powers and connects our world — transmitting signals, carrying electricity, and enabling the networks we depend on every day. Yet despite their omnipresence, EMF remain beyond human perception, shaping our lives silently and invisibly. This paradox — essential but unseen — prompted me to consider EMF as more than a technical force: it resonates conceptually with religious presence, something ubiquitous, intangible, and taken on faith.

From this realization, I began to explore how EMF could be made perceptible. In early experiments, I used colorful threads to visualize the “field lines” around domestic appliances such as a washing machine and a lamp. These speculative gestures externalized the unseen into visible extensions, treating EMF as a material presence intruding into everyday space. Though not scientific measurements, these experiments served as the first step in reframing EMF as a medium for rethinking perception, ritual, and human–technology relations.

The project draws inspiration from Curious Rituals, which documents how everyday technological gestures can evolve into new forms of embodied behavior. In the context of electromagnetic fields (EMF), ordinary actions — flipping a switch, touching a device, waiting for a signal — are reimagined as unconscious rituals of dependence on the invisible.

To explore this transformation, I created performative GIFs with collaborators, enacting everyday gestures with devices as if they were ritual offerings. These short performances exaggerate familiar interactions — holding a phone, pressing a button, or staring at a screen — to reveal their ritualistic undertones.

Alongside, sketches abstract these actions into symbolic forms, mapping how mundane interactions become ritualized encounters with EMF. The drawings extend the performative gestures into a visual vocabulary of ritual, bridging daily technology use with sacred symbolism.

Building on this idea, The Underground Palace constructs a virtual temple where EMF is reframed as a sacred presence. Within this space, habitual gestures are transformed into acts of reverence, as though participants were engaging in dialogue with an unseen deity. Borrowing from the spatial logic of a confession room — intimate yet solemn — the narrative positions participants not as passive viewers, but as speculative worshippers. Through this reframing, EMF becomes both material and mediator, prompting reflection on how modern rituals of technology shape our relationship to forces we cannot see yet constantly rely upon.

The design development of The Underground Palace focused on shaping EMF into a spatial and auditory experience inside a virtual environment. Using New Art City as the platform, the project combined architectural modeling and sound composition to construct an immersive temple where invisible forces become perceptible.

1 / 3D Modeling

Inspired by the circuitry and materiality of electronic devices, I modeled oversized electronic components and reimagined them as monumental structures. Resistors, capacitors, and circuit traces were transformed into columns, arches, and lattices, building an environment where technology itself becomes sacred architecture. These elements emit luminous gradients and radiating patterns, suggesting electromagnetic fields extending through the space. The result is not simply a literal translation of electronics but a speculative environment where infrastructure becomes temple, and scale shifts daily components into immersive landscapes.

2 / Sound Design

The sonic layer was developed by building a custom Arduino-based tool to capture electromagnetic emissions from everyday electronic components. Inspired by the MAARBLE project “Sounds of Space”, which transforms cosmic radio waves into musical compositions, I adapted this method to the domestic scale. The collected signals — hums, clicks, and static textures — were treated as raw materials, edited and layered into the soundscape of the virtual palace. Within New Art City, these sounds resonate with the spatial modeling, surrounding participants with both visual and auditory traces of EMF. In this way, the design development bridges material and immaterial, allowing EMF to be experienced as both structure and atmosphere.

The project culminated in a virtual exhibition presented on New Art City, an online platform for creating and sharing browser-based 3D environments. Here, The Underground Palace was experienced as an immersive installation, where monumental structures inspired by electronic components and layered EMF soundscapes formed a sacred space.

As part of the final showcase, audiences could enter the environment directly through their browser, moving through the virtual temple and encountering EMF as both structure and atmosphere. By situating the work on New Art City, the outcome emphasized accessibility and collective experience—transforming speculative design into a shared exhibition context.

The Underground Palace was conceived not as a solution but as a provocation. By translating EMF into monumental forms and ritualized soundscapes, the project challenged how we perceive and relate to invisible infrastructures. It reframed everyday dependence on technology as acts of reverence, asking what happens when the unseen is treated as sacred.

Presented as a real exhibition on New Art City, the project invited audiences to enter the virtual temple through their browsers. Many described the experience as both unsettling and contemplative — ordinary gestures felt strangely ritualized, and the soundscape reinforced the sense of being immersed in something beyond control. This response affirmed the project’s aim: to prompt reflection on how invisible forces shape our behaviors and our beliefs.