concert design, art spaces, and the mechanics of audience with DuckUnit

setting the stage with DuckUnit

Based in Bangkok, Thailand, the design and production studio DuckUnit uses light, mechanical movement, and the possibilities of the stage as its tools for creating spectacular events that range from concerts to contemporary art installations to performance. Founded in 2005 by Wit Pimkanchanapong, the group starts by working on concerts and other works of art. Now, the group is led by Rueangrith Suntisuk and Pornpan Arayaveerasid, alongside a team of creatives who work together to bring creative spectacles to life.

In the midst of a project in Paris, Rueangrith Suntisuk chats with designboom about the studio’s current technical explorations and its work between the worlds of music and art.

Rueangrith Suntisuk in conversation with designboom

The group recently wrapped a large-scale installation at the international performing arts festival in Brussels, Kunstenfestivaldesarts. It was called A Flower of Forgetfulness and was a collaborative effort between DuckUnit, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and sound engineers and composers Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr and Koichi Shimizu. Inside an old chapel, projected videos, sound, light, and movement were put into dialogue to create a profound performance. In the days leading up to and surrounding the work, the many members of DuckUnit were busy perfecting the mechanical elements of the show, documenting their work, and making sure the timing was perfectly in tune with the rest of the installation’s elements.

Looking back on the many hands and varied talents that the installation required, the group recalls a busy flock, which is how they came up with the name. Suntisuk shares, ‘We started as a design collective working across many fields, from concerts and theatre to art. We combine the different disciplines we’ve learned and understood to make our work. The name DuckUnit comes from our curiosity in many directions, and from constantly trying to do things we don’t yet know how to do.’

From concert halls to art spaces

‘When we work on concert stages or films, we usually try to make the audience take in the same story from the same point of view,’ remarks Suntisuk on the more traditional performances they work on, where the audience and the spectacle are two discrete things. The group recently worked on the show FLURE LIFE for the Thai alt-rock band. In the show, giant watercolor illustrations of eyeballs, slithering snakes, and sleeping faces rise and fall to tell a kind of fable behind the band’s concert.

‘In our recent art works, we try to think the opposite way.’ DuckUnit has created a multitude of installations, including the silent disco Embargo of Silence and the outdoor installation Two Who Remember the Sea, made with Weerasethakul and Guo-Liang Tan. ‘We open up space for variety among the audience and the work, so that the audience dissolves into the space and becomes part of the work itself. We’ve found that this opens up possibilities for both the audience and ourselves to understand the piece, with different kinds of beauty that we could never have predicted from the start.’

timelapse of the FLURE LIFE concert, 2026

 

Working with an audience’s expectations

A silent disco, where the audience gets the music via headphones rather than speakers, is just the beginning of the particular environments DuckUnit has designed. Consider Love after Death by artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, shown at the 2025 Taipei Biennial. For this piece, the studio suspended a semitransparent panel that caught a projection and bent light that oozed out into a space behind the screen. ‘In a concert, audience satisfaction usually starts at 100, and people hope for even more.’ Suntisuk goes on to contrast this with the other world the studio works in: ‘In art, the audience’s attention and focus sometime start at 0. Understanding these different states of the audience has strongly shaped our newer work, and moving between these different demands shapes how we make our work.’

Developing new technical abilities

One thing evident in the studio’s work, regardless of genre, is its constant experimentation with how light and movement can add an element to visual storytelling. To refine its approach to scenography, the studio revisits its scenographic techniques. ‘In many recent works we’ve used fabric, smoke, motors, projection, light, and objects we can’t fully control. The new things that happen usually come from trying to control these elements and then letting them go. They tend to appear at the moment when these elements meet. Right now we’re learning how they coexist and what effect they have on each other.’

project info:

studio: DuckUnit | @duckunit_

location: Bangkok, Thailand

studio leads: Rueangrith Suntisuk and Pornpan Arayaveerasid

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