A collection of gongs and resonating instruments alongside an 18-voice just intonation soundscape, tuned to four primary gongs.

As the gongs are played, their acoustic waves modulate the sine waves in the space, creating an interactive environment in which physical and digital frequencies shape one another.

The Gong Library invites artists, musicians, and community members into playful exploration with its instruments, found objects, and traditional instruments. These encounters give rise to conversation and organic relational happenings, where making art and music unfolds alongside shared exchange.

We also facilitate instrument-led meditations, exploring ways to bring sound wellness into dialogue with contemporary music and art practice.

The Gong Library Ensemble brings together Matthew Ariaratnam, Irene Senent, Adrian Avendaño, and Raj Gill in a shared practice of improvisation, resonant metal, and deep listening.

Drawing from experimental music, classical and avant-garde traditions, minimalism, sound art, and pulse-driven rhythm, the ensemble creates immersive live environments using gongs and an evolving collection of instruments from the Gong Library alongside guitar, violin, and percussion. Their performances move between dense, high-intensity textures and spacious melodic passages, inviting audiences into a playful, collective encounter with sound.

The library houses a carefully curated collection bridging physical and electronic mediums:

An extensive physical collection housing over 20 different types of gongs from various regions of the world, in addition to diverse percussion instruments, bells, and other global resonating instruments. This also includes a precise set of seven planetary chimes tuned to specific frequencies based on the Cosmic Octave system.

Custom electronic synthesis and high-fidelity sound systems that integrate with physical strikes to generate complex, enveloping sonic environments. This features an 18-voice just intonation sine wave landscape tuned to the four principal gongs. When the gongs are struck, their acoustic sound waves actively modulate the sine waves in the space, creating a highly interactive and unique sonic experience where physical and digital frequencies shape one another.

The installation continues to evolve as a highly adaptable, interactive acoustic experience, touring across regional festivals and public spaces:

• Indian Summer Festival: Ocean Artworks, Granville Island Installation (July 17, 2026)
• Vines Art Festival: Featuring a live performance by the Gong Library Ensemble (2025)
• Sh’bang Festival: Bellingham, Washington, USA (2024)

Imaginal Airlines is an immersive, relational art experience that merges theatrical narrative, sound, and participatory design. Rather than presenting itself as theatre, the project commits fully to the airline as its container: artists take on the roles of crew, and visitors arrive as passengers entering a collective journey.

The experience begins before anyone enters the venue. Participants encounter Imaginal Airlines through a custom-designed website, where they book their flight and receive travel information and a boarding pass. On arrival, they move through a reimagined airport and plane experience: check-in, security, boarding, safety announcements, and pre-flight instructions are transformed through original poetry, sound, and open-ended meditative framing. The venue becomes a temporary terminal and cabin—an immersive world that shifts familiar rituals of air travel toward attention, imagination, and shared presence.

Imaginal Airlines is a situational artwork shaped by acoustic depth. Each flight is guided by a custom animated digital score that shapes live musical improvisation, resonant instrumentation, and experiential soundscapes, inviting somatic embodiment and sensory exploration.

The live music and sound for current flights are created by the Imaginal Cells sextet. Future flights will invite other artists and musicians to develop and guide distinct flight paths, expanding the project’s sonic language, artistic relationships, and public reach.

www.imaginalairlines.com

Imaginal Airlines is made through a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of artists and musicians who shape the passenger experience.

We have a rotating cast of crew members.

Hosted in 2025, International Drone Day was a dedicated exploration of sustained sound, deep listening, and immersive acoustic environments. Deliberately structured as an “early show,” the event ran continuously from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, shifting the typical late-night context of experimental music into a daytime setting. The gathering brought together a diverse lineup of sound artists, musicians, and collectives to celebrate drone music as both a sonic practice and a communal, relational experience. Across the day, the event moved through Indian classical, gamelan, modular synth, acoustic, gong-based, live electronics, and electroacoustic approaches to drone-inspired music.

To create distinct auditory environments, the event was physically and conceptually divided across two rooms:

The sonic palette across the program included Indian classical, gamelan, modular synth, acoustic, gong-based, live electronics, and electroacoustic practices.

Dedicated to electronic drone and digital synthesis, creating an immersive, frequency-driven atmosphere.

Focused entirely on acoustic and live instrumentation, offering a grounded, resonant, and physical sonic experience.

• Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka
• Akhil Jobanputra
• Souns (Michael Red)
• how to survive a high rise hotel fire — collective started by bassist Nikko Whitworth and oboist Haley Bird
• J.T. Gladysz
• Screens — Harley Small and Jordaniel Bennett
• Gong Library Resource — Irene Senent, Matthew Ariaratnam, and Raj Gill

International Drone Day prioritized acoustic intimacy and collective resonance. By programming the performances during the day and physically separating the electronic and acoustic elements into two distinct spaces, the event allowed attendees to curate their own auditory journey. It offered participants a shared, daytime meditative space to explore the physical and emotional impacts of sustained audio across different mediums, reinforcing the use of sound and spatial design as structural tools to build temporary, immersive community containers.

Active for three years before the property's eventual demolition, the Wheel of Time Gallery served as the foundational incubator for the Temporary Frames Arts Society. The gallery leased the property from The Molnar Group at 2655 Renfrew Street, transforming it into a living mandala and a dynamic community hub. Over its lifespan, the gallery hosted seven distinct exhibition cycles, showcasing the work of over 40 local and international artists and musicians before concluding its physical existence in 2021.

The conceptual framework for the gallery emerged from a chance encounter with the Kalachakra ("Wheel of Time") Tantra at the Dorje-Ling Dharma Centre on Cortes Island — a Tibetan Buddhist teaching focused on the cyclical nature and inevitable impermanence of all material forms. Rather than resisting the structural fate of the teardown house, the project actively "annealed" it.

Drawing upon Hakim Bey's concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), as well as the philosophical frameworks of Nietzsche's eternal return, Bergson's duration, Dewey's Art as Experience, and Ron Fricke's cinematic work Samsara, the property was treated as a living, breathing canvas. It provided a rare, uncommodified environment to rework, rewrite, and reimagine what a domestic home could be. It operated simultaneously as a gallery, an active studio, and a living space, with many participating artists serendipitously finding their way into the project through chance encounters in the city.

My Mental Institution was the final exhibition at the Wheel of Time Gallery before the building was demolished. A planned group exhibition was reconfigured as a solo work in response to COVID-19 gathering restrictions, turning the enforced isolation of the period into part of the project’s subject.

A personal bedroom was transformed into an all-white installation, with the walls, ceiling, and floor painted white. The room became a self-constructed institutional space through which Gill examined repetition, perception, identity, and the psychological routines that can come to feel fixed or automatic.

The exhibition drew on Gill’s physical-theatre and clown training, particularly David MacMurray Smith’s framework of perceptual “editions of reality”: the ways perception is organized into meaning, predictability, repetition, and habitual patterns, alongside the possibility of interrupting those patterns through surprise or a return to apparent chaos.

Part of the work also grew from a formative 2005 volunteer experience at a mental health facility that raised questions for Gill about clowning, perception, repetition, and the ethics of encountering other people’s realities. Rather than using that experience to make claims about mental illness, the exhibition redirected the inquiry toward the artist’s own recurring behaviours and conditioned patterns: What loops do I inhabit? What becomes automatic? Where does a different choice become possible?

Within the white room, the “institution” therefore became both spatial and internal. The self could be understood simultaneously as the person caught inside recurring patterns and the observer capable of noticing, editing, or redirecting them.

The exhibition also completed the Wheel of Time Gallery’s longer engagement with impermanence. The house had always been understood as temporary: a residential structure awaiting demolition that was gradually transformed into a gallery, studio, living space, and collective artwork.

In the final months, the impending demolition gave the exhibition a literal endpoint. Themes of cyclical time, repetition, destruction, and renewal—already present throughout the Wheel of Time project through the Kalachakra (“Wheel of Time”), Bergson’s duration, and the idea of eternal return—became embedded in the final activation of the building itself.

Because pandemic restrictions limited conventional public access and the building was nearing demolition, My Mental Institution was preserved digitally as a virtual tour, allowing a record of the final spatial transformation to remain after the physical site disappeared.

The Temporary Frames Artist Residency is an ongoing grassroots program that shares available community and project spaces with multidisciplinary artists. Offered as suitable time and space become available, the residency gives artists a dedicated environment for self-directed research, rehearsal, making, reflection, or rest without requiring an exhibition, performance, or finished work.

Established in 2018 in response to the scarcity and cost of accessible workspace in Vancouver, the program treats available space as a resource to be shared. Residents have included practitioners in physical theatre, visual art, sculpture, spoken word, clown, and reclaimed-material practice.

The residency is deliberately flexible. Its duration, setting, and working conditions adapt to the spaces Temporary Frames has access to and to the needs of each artist. Rather than organizing the residency around a required public outcome, the program supports stages of practice that are often difficult to resource: thinking, researching, rehearsing, testing, experimenting, and allowing work to develop at its own pace.

The residency extends Temporary Frames’ broader practice of using temporary or underused spaces as cultural infrastructure. Its value lies in the relationship between artist, time, space, and community rather than in the production of a predetermined deliverable.

By maintaining room for process without a required endpoint, the residency supports forms of creative labour that are often invisible within presentation-focused arts models and asks a simple question: what becomes possible when an artist is given space and time without being asked to prove the experience through a finished product?

Clown Working Group is a self-facilitated research ensemble investigating clown as a practice of presence, improvisation, and relation. Since 2024, participants have worked in seasonal terms, each centred on a specific question and a set of repeatable scores.

The research asks how a performer can follow impulse without steering toward a result, make internal experience legible, hold contradictory states, and remain responsive to a room. Rigor comes through sustained duration, shared vocabulary, clear agreements, reflection, and return.

Beginning with the second term, each cycle has ended in a public process showing. These events share the group’s current place in the research and allow the presence of an audience to become part of the investigation.

The continuing ensemble forms the riverbed: its shared pedagogy, agreements, and term-level intention. Invited practitioners enter as tributaries, bringing other histories and pressures into the research. This structure keeps the group’s practice legible while allowing it to change. Facilitation remains collective.

The group’s shared vocabulary is rooted in the clown pedagogy of David MacMurray Smith and Fantastic Space Enterprises, including clown nature, rivering, masks, and paths of permission. MacMurray Smith periodically mentors and reviews the work; the weekly sessions are self-facilitated. See “With Our Clown Nature in Mind,” Canadian Theatre Review 183 (2020).

Pochinko and Grotowski appear as earlier influences within this pedagogical lineage.

A term is a seasonal cycle of weekly sessions. The group confirms five terms and four public process showings. The Summer 2025 record remains incomplete.

Beginning with the second term, each seasonal cycle has ended in a public sharing: four showings in total. The group presents its current place in the research, allowing uncertainty, vulnerability, miscommunication, recovery, and change to remain visible.

The working notes describe a “documentary shift”: audiences responded most strongly when performers stayed freshly present with changing material. The showings also revealed that an open process benefits from a precise audience invitation.

These threads recur across sessions and show how the group’s questions have changed through repetition, disagreement, bodily experience, and public testing.

Temporary Frames develops environments, performances, and participatory formats that foreground sustained attention to sound. Across the Gong Library and related programming, deep listening is explored through acoustic instruments, electronic sound, spatial and headphone-based audio, contemplative practice, sensory autonomy, and collective gathering.

This page gathers projects, presentations, and earlier programs that contribute to that listening practice.

Temporary Frames hosts and co-produces one-off readings, launches, performances, concerts, and interdisciplinary gatherings with artists and community partners. These presentations extend the organization’s spaces and production infrastructure into platforms for artistic exchange, experimentation, and public presentation.

Individual events are recorded as completed presentations within this ongoing programming stream rather than treated as standalone active projects.

On 11 July 2025, the Gong Library hosted the launch of E.A. van Wyk’s poetry collection Bruised Butterfly. The event centered on a live reading by the author, with an audience gathered in the library for an intimate literary presentation.

Van Wyk’s work explores immigrant identity, isolation, climate grief, memory, belonging, and transformation. The launch extended the Gong Library’s programming beyond sound-based performance into poetry and spoken word, using the space as a focused setting for author and audience to meet.

For this presentation, Temporary Frames’ role was straightforward: the Gong Library provided the venue and hosted the reading. The event demonstrates the space’s capacity to support small-scale literary and interdisciplinary gatherings alongside its ongoing sound and listening programs.

In October 2024, the Gong Library hosted the launch of Aaron Friend Lettner’s Book of Light for the Hypha Arts Social Club. Book of Light is a 78-card black-and-white photographic Tarot deck assembled from an archive of more than 4,000 negatives made over seven years, primarily along Canada’s West Coast.

The launch included live card readings with attendees. As cards were drawn, Lettner and participants used the photographs as prompts for conversation, interpretation, and unexpected associations between images.

The card-reading format gave attendees a direct way to encounter the photographic deck through conversation as well as through the images themselves. The event combined a publication launch with a participatory activity while retaining the informal scale of the Hypha Arts Social Club.

For Temporary Frames and the Gong Library, the presentation expanded the space’s programming into photography, publishing, and participatory visual art.

Temporary Frames works closely with Hypha Artist Association. The Temporary Frames studio and offices are located within Hypha Arts, and the two organizations periodically co-produce concerts, listening events, performances, and community gatherings.

Hypha Artist Association Society provides essential, subsidized cultural work space to a diverse community of Vancouver-based artists and cultural organizations.

Visit hyphaarts.ca →

Hypha Artist Association Society is a horizontally structured collective of artists and cultural organizations working across diverse disciplines. It maintains private studios and a shared common space for events, gatherings, art shows, music, and community programming—a modular, DIY environment that changes with the needs of its community.

Spanning four distinct events, the Quiet Night Series was a decentralized, multidisciplinary performance initiative that prioritized radical accessibility and acoustic intimacy. Hosted within the temporary, community-driven frameworks of Kids Castle and the Wheel of Time Gallery, the series functioned as a free platform dedicated to cultivating deep, intentional engagement between performers, the space, and the audience.

To dismantle traditional curatorial gatekeeping, Quiet Night utilized a lottery-based selection model, welcoming artists and creators across all mediums to participate. The defining parameter for every performance was a low-volume constraint. This acoustic limitation acted as both a creative prompt and a leveling mechanism, challenging artists to experiment with short-form, quiet works. Stripped of loud amplification, the physical environment of the house shaped the acoustics, and attendees were naturally guided into a posture of active, focused listening.

As an exercise in situational art, Quiet Night demonstrated that stripping away volume could actually amplify presence. By enforcing quietness within the inherently active, ephemeral environments of a tear-down house, the series carved out a highly accessible testing ground for vulnerability and experimentation. It cultivated a highly engaged, relational setting where silence, subtlety, and deep listening became the primary mediums for community connection.

CLOUD Studio was an independent movement and clowning workspace co-created by Raj Gill and Tyrell Warren inside a converted Vancouver garage. Built largely from salvaged and found materials, the studio provided an accessible and consistent space for physical training, improvisation, and ensemble practice. It became an important incubator for practitioners working with David MacMurray Smith’s clown methodology before the property was demolished for redevelopment and elements of the practice continued at Hypha Arts.

In 2019, responding to the scarcity and cost of accessible rehearsal space in Vancouver, Raj Gill and Tyrell Warren transformed an unused residential garage into CLOUD Studio.

Operating outside conventional institutional and commercial studio structures, CLOUD provided a dedicated environment for physical theatre practitioners investigating clown, kinetic release, relational awareness, and the pedagogical lineage of David MacMurray Smith. Its small scale and low overhead allowed artists to return regularly for sustained practice rather than working only within the time limits of rented rehearsal rooms.

The studio became a testing ground for somatic research, ensemble improvisation, rivering, mask work, and process-oriented rehearsal. Its value came less from formal production than from continuity: artists could repeatedly investigate impulse, presence, relationship, and physical responsiveness within a stable practice community.

CLOUD Studio embodied an approach that would become central to Temporary Frames: using overlooked or temporary architecture to create meaningful cultural infrastructure.

The garage was adapted largely through reclaimed materials, connecting the physical construction of the studio to broader questions of waste, value, reuse, and transformation. Rather than waiting for ideal facilities or significant resources, the project demonstrated how an existing space could be converted into a functional artistic container through collective labour and improvisation.

The property was eventually demolished for redevelopment. The loss of the building, however, did not end the artistic research it supported. The community, practices, and working methods developed at CLOUD continued elsewhere, including at Hypha Arts.

CLOUD Studio therefore represents an early expression of a recurring Temporary Frames principle: the physical container may be temporary, while the relationships, practices, and creative lineages developed inside it can endure.

• MATERIAL RECLAMATION: Salvaged and found materials were used to construct and equip the studio, embedding reuse and resourcefulness directly into the project.
• SPACE CONVERSION: An underused residential garage was transformed into a functional movement and rehearsal environment.
• SUSTAINED PRACTICE: Regular access allowed artists to maintain ongoing physical, somatic, and improvisational research outside formal classes or short-term rentals.
• LINEAGE & RESEARCH: The studio supported investigation of David MacMurray Smith’s clown methodology, including mask work, kinetic release, rivering, and Ringmaster awareness.
• CONTINUITY THROUGH CHANGE: When the building was demolished, the practices and community developed at CLOUD migrated into subsequent artistic contexts, including Hypha Arts.

Interactive Community Arts gathers a group of participatory projects in which art is made through direct encounter: with symbols, geometry, materials, shadows, sound, play, and other people.

These works share an interest in temporary structures, accessible participation, relational play, material transformation, and collective imagination.

GLYPH yo Self was a participatory community art project housed within the Wheel of Time (WOT) Gallery—a temporary, immersive gathering space situated inside a Vancouver residential property slated for demolition. The project served as a collective intervention, inviting individuals to leave a deliberate, personal mark on a structure nearing the end of its lifecycle.

Participants were invited into the space to design and create their own personal symbols, or "glyphs," using pieces of donated wood. These individual wooden totems were then integrated directly into the architecture of the house, slowly covering and transforming the space through community contribution.

Rooted in themes of impermanence, cycles, and transition, the project embraced the impending demolition of the venue rather than resisting it. By embedding personal symbols into a doomed structure, GLYPH yo Self explored the tension between creation and destruction. It functioned as both an aesthetic transformation of a tear-down property and a situational art experience, allowing the community to collectively grieve, celebrate, and redefine a space in its final moments.

Sri Yantra was a large-scale, participatory mandala art piece created as the symbolic and energetic anchor for Kids Castle; a temporary collective house and experimental community arts hub in Vancouver. Rather than a solitary artistic endeavor, the piece functioned as a situational gathering point, bringing people together through a shared act of creation.

The creation of the mandala was deeply rooted in communal effort and resourceful ingenuity. The physical painting of the piece was a collective action carried out by members of the house, visiting friends, and the broader KC community. True to the collective’s ethos of sustainability and working within temporary frameworks, the entire piece was brought to life using exclusively reclaimed paints salvaged from a local recycling center.

Serving as an early precursor to the relational projects housed under Temporary Frames and the Wheel of Time Gallery, the Kids Castle Sri Yantra utilized sacred geometry to ground a chaotic, highly creative environment. The Sri Yantra represents cosmic cycles, the intersection of energies, and the journey toward the center. By relying on salvaged materials and the overlapping contributions of many different hands, the act of making the mandala mirrored its meaning; transforming a temporary, shared living situation into an intentional container for connection, impermanence, and collective art-making.

The Deep Listening Sound Sessions were a four-session series of intimate live sound journeys featuring Vancouver artist Michael Red and co-produced by Light Blues and the Gong Library. Presented at Hypha Arts, the sessions combined a room sound system with wireless stereo headphones equipped with individual volume controls, allowing each participant to adjust their own listening level while remaining part of a shared acoustic environment.

Michael Red performed responsive ambient soundscapes incorporating electronic synthesis, processed and dubbed-out nature recordings, and frequency-focused material. Attendance was intentionally limited to maintain a quiet, spacious setting.

Each session was structured around the full arc of arrival, listening, and re-entry. Guests arrived to quiet music, herbal tea, and homemade cookies before the performance began. Entry closed once the sound journey was underway in order to minimize interruption.

Participants could listen from cushions, blankets, and seating throughout the Gong Library. Wireless headphones offered individual volume control alongside the physical sound of the room. A secondary lounge with couches provided additional space for movement, rest, or temporary withdrawal from the main listening area.

The series explored how spatial design and audio technology can support different modes of attention within a shared listening experience. Individual headphone volume, multiple seating options, limited capacity, and access to a secondary room gave participants greater control over how they engaged with the performance.

Within the broader Gong Library program, the sessions became one example of deep listening as both an artistic practice and a form of gathering: creating conditions for sustained attention, introspection, acoustic immersion, and shared quiet.

View within the Deep Listening practice area →

Co-presented by Low Indigo and Temporary Frames, the inaugural outdoor edition of AMBIENT/ETC transformed the grounds around Hadden Park Field House into a durational listening environment for ambient and experimental music. Curated by Michael Red, the event combined live electronic performance, modular synthesis, DJ sets, artist pop-ups, and optional wireless headphones supplied by Modern Biology.

AMBIENT/ETC — OUTDOOR EDITION 001 extended Low Indigo’s ambient and experimental music programming into a public outdoor setting. Attendees were invited to move freely through the site, sit or lie on the grass, and encounter the performances within the surrounding park and waterfront environment.

The program featured SEEKERS INTERNATIONAL with Juwan Stockton, alongside live sets from PESEWA, CEASE WYSS on modular synth, DANIEL MAJER, ELI MURO, PIU, and SOUNS. XIUMEI contributed custom DJ edits, while SLIME STUDIO and EZ.NAIVE hosted pop-ups alongside the music program.

Modern Biology supplied stereo wireless headphones as an optional listening format, allowing attendees to hear greater sonic detail while remaining mobile within the site.

The event received partial financial support from the City of Vancouver, with additional support from Hypha Arts, Ephemeral Objects, and Roshni Riar. Admission operated on a donation basis, with collected funds distributed among participating artists and organizers.

By relocating experimental music from an indoor venue to Hadden Park, the event placed electronic and acoustic material in direct relationship with the surrounding environmental soundscape. Wind, water, public activity, amplified sound, and headphone listening became overlapping parts of the experience.

The outdoor format also allowed people to encounter experimental music without entering a conventional club or concert setting. In this context, AMBIENT/ETC functioned as both a music presentation and an experiment in how public space can support informal, sustained, and collective listening.

Cardboard Day was a highly interactive, relational art event that transformed discarded commercial materials into a large-scale community build and public celebration. The project functioned as a temporary creative container, inviting the public to engage in collective play, hands-on construction, and a spontaneous, mobile celebration of the everyday.

The foundation of the project began with active resource gathering: sourcing massive, free pieces of discarded cardboard from local furniture stores. These reclaimed materials were then brought to a designated site where participants were provided with supplies, space, and an open invitation to build whatever they could imagine out of the cardboard.

Once the communal build phase was complete, the static workshop transitioned into a public activation. Participants gathered their freshly made creations and embarked on a "Cardboard Day Parade" around Trout Lake. We also invited musicians to come join. This lively procession functioned as a celebration of the cardboard itself, drawing in local park-goers who spontaneously joined the parade along the route.

As a highly successful piece of situational art, Cardboard Day highlighted the potential for joy and connection through accessible, low-stakes materials. By transforming commercial waste (furniture boxes) into the focal point of a public parade, the project blurred the lines between everyday life, workshop, and performance. It demonstrated that a simple invitation to build and celebrate could foster immediate, unpretentious community engagement, temporarily transforming a public park into an immersive, shared reality.

An improvised, participatory shadow puppetry and music event designed to dissolve the boundary between audience and performer through collaborative, real-time storytelling.

In 2018, the Wheel of Time Gallery hosted Shadowjam, a highly interactive situational art event facilitated by East Vancouver experimental theatre duo Mind of a Snail. The gathering transformed the teardown house into a collective, lo-fi projection laboratory. By blending real-time shadow projection, live musical looping, and tactile puppet fabrication, the event invited the community to participate in a shared, unscripted dreamscape where everyone functioned simultaneously as creator, musician, and narrator.

Expanding the Wheel of Time Gallery's mandate as a Temporary Autonomous Zone for intentional play, Temporary Frames collaborated with Mind of a Snail (Chloé Ziner and Jessica Gabriel) to host a Shadowjam in 2018. Active since 2003, Mind of a Snail is a pioneering experimental shadow theatre duo renowned for their multilayered visual storytelling, utilizing vintage overhead projectors, colorful analog backgrounds, and lo-fi special effects.

For this installation, the traditional theatrical model was completely decentralized. Rather than presenting a rehearsed, static performance, the Shadowjam functioned as an inclusive, co-created environment. The architecture of the event was broken down into active phases of craft, play, and sonic improvisation.

Upon entering, participants were provided with raw materials to construct their own physical shadow puppets. A large screen was suspended in the gallery and illuminated by multiple overhead projectors. Operating with a fluid, non-hierarchical structure, attendees were encouraged to freely rotate through different artistic roles—stepping behind the sheet as puppeteers, joining the live musical looping as sonic improvisers, or providing spontaneous narration. The resulting performance operated as a highly relational "choose your own adventure," where the art existed solely in the ephemeral collaboration of the strangers in the room.

Shadowjam perfectly encapsulated the Temporary Frames ethos of "relational empowerment." By providing the community with simple, highly accessible tools (overhead projectors, paper, scissors, and looping pedals) and a safe structural container, the event proved that profound theatrical magic does not require high budgets or polished scripts. It relies on the willingness of a community to engage in vulnerable, collective imagination.

• TACTILE FABRICATIONIntegrating a hands-on "Craft & Play" component, ensuring participants physically engaged with the material creation of the art before manipulating it in the shadow space.
• ANALOG PROJECTIONUtilizing analog overhead projectors to create highly accessible, multilayered optical environments without the barrier of complex digital rendering.
• FLUID HIERARCHIESDismantling traditional audience-performer dynamics by structuring the event as an inclusive "shared dream," where attendees actively rotated between the roles of puppeteer, musician, and observer.
• SONIC IMPROVISATIONCoupling the visual storytelling with a live, improvised soundtrack and real-time looping, anchoring the visual transience of the shadows in a continuous, responsive acoustic environment.

A community-funded, participatory art installation transforming a custom-painted ping-pong table into a live musical instrument, a 50-player interactive game, and eventually, repurposed community seating.

Supported by a Vancouver Small Neighbourhood Grant and produced by Temporary Frames, this project reimagined table tennis as a dynamic, relational sound installation. Featuring custom artwork by a student from Byrne Creek Secondary, the table was equipped with contact microphones that translated the percussive strikes of the game into live musical improvisation. After touring various community events—including Publik Secrets' Musical Playground and hosting mass-participation, knockout-style tournaments for up to 50 players, the table completed its lifecycle. After two years of use the piece was upcycled and transformed into dedicated seating for the Gong Library.

Designed to inject innovative interactivity into a traditional recreational sport, this project centered around the creation of a uniquely customized, art-stylized ping-pong table. The table’s visual identity was anchored by an original painting completed by a student from Byrne Creek Secondary, embedding local youth collaboration directly into the physical architecture of the piece.

To elevate the table from a visual set piece into a dynamic musical instrument, contact microphones were affixed to its underside. These sensors captured the distinctive acoustic impacts produced when balls struck the surface, processing the kinetic energy of the game into a diverse range of auditory outputs. With every strike and volley, the players actively contributed to an ever-evolving symphony of sound, transforming a standard rally into a live, rhythmic improvisation.

Moving beyond the auditory innovations, the project radically altered the standard rules of engagement by introducing a novel, high-capacity gameplay model. Rather than a traditional two-player format, the system was designed to accommodate mass participation, allowing up to 50 players to surround the table simultaneously.

Armed with paddles, participants engaged in a frantic, knockout-style format: successfully return a ball to the opposite side to stay in the game, or miss and be eliminated. This high-density model generated immediate unpredictability and thrill. The sheer volume of bodies crowding the table created suspense and altered the strategic dimensions of the game, as the large initial group gradually whittled down to a final pair. By merging sound, physical movement, and high-stakes communal play, the project successfully transformed a neighborhood sport into a deeply engaging piece of situational art.

The Sonic Ping-Pong table was designed not as a static gallery object, but as a mobile community activator. Over a two-year period, it was deployed across multiple Vancouver environments. It saw recurring use at Byrne Creek Secondary, engaging the very student body that helped design it, and was used in the installation at Musical Playground, an interactive event operated by Publik Secrets.

Aligning with the Temporary Frames ethos of material reclamation and impermanence, the installation was never meant to last forever. After two years of use, the table was decommissioned. Rather than entering the waste stream, the materials were upcycled and re-fabricated into custom wooden benches. These benches now reside permanently in the Gong Library, continuing to provide grounding and support for the community in an entirely new form.

The Plant Listening Show, co-produced by Kate Kennedy and Raj Gill in partnership with Hypha Arts, was the inaugural event for the Temporary Frames space at Hypha Arts. The gathering combined a dedicated listening environment with an informal plant-care and exchange space, inviting participants to attend with their houseplants.

Music by Raj Gill, incorporating sounds contributed by Jessica Gabriel, was presented in the listening room. Tulsi (Holy Basil) plants grown in advance of the event served as a recurring botanical element: fresh Tulsi tea was shared with attendees, while participants were also invited to bring plants for repotting, propagation, care, or exchange.

The main Hypha Arts space functioned as the active social area. Participants could talk, exchange clippings, propagate, and repot plants while sharing practical plant-care knowledge.

The Temporary Frames room was maintained as a quiet listening area with cushions, mats, and sofas. Attendees and their plants could settle into the room for the music without the conversational activity of the main space.

As the first activation of the Temporary Frames space at Hypha Arts, the event established a two-room model that paired social participation with focused listening. Its plant-centered format brought music, informal ecological care, and community exchange into the same event without requiring them to function as a conventional concert or workshop.

The presentation also extended the invitation to listen beyond the human audience by explicitly welcoming plants into the room, using a playful multispecies frame to encourage attention to care, environment, and shared space.