A Speaker That Knows Where You Are, and Whispers
At Columbia's 2026 MFA thesis show, an artist from the Iyarhe Nakoda Nation lists "my ancestor's stories" as a material, equal to wood and ribbon. The room fills with sound that knows where you are sitting, and refuses to be louder than that.
The Columbia 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition closes tomorrow at the Wallach Art Gallery, and one piece in particular reframes what a domestic speaker could be. darylina powderface, an interdisciplinary artist from the Iyarhe Nakoda Nation and Siksika Nation, calls her sculpture "twelve components (amber and ash wooden poles, wood shaving bundles, satin ribbon, and my ancestor's stories, 2026)." The medium line treats ancestor stories as physical material, equal to the wood and the ribbon.
A companion video of the same name fills the room with multi-channel sound through directional audio. Eleven minutes, looped. Score by sound art MFA Asalaus. A dancer dressed in red moves through a forest, rhyming with the red ribbon binding the poles. Symbolic shapes get projected onto the floor, dappling the wood shaving bundles like light through a canopy. Directional audio usually exists to be louder than the room: museum kiosks, airport gates, mall ads. Here it does the opposite. The sound knows where you are without announcing itself. It belongs to a specific spot in the gallery, the way a quiet voice does.
This is what we mean by the shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being. The tools we already have, redirected to make a room feel more attended to. Speakers know where you are. They mostly use that to be louder. What happens when the same beam aiming the airport announcement becomes a way to tell a story to one person in one chair? Maybe the next generation of bedroom speakers gets prototyped in an art gallery before it ships in a box.