Young & Human team up with WRST Collective for an interactive phygital audio installation at Cairo Design Week, presenting a collaborative experience that merges physical design with digital layers to create an immersive, sound-responsive environment running from November 20 to 29. Situated 187 meters above the city of Cairo, the project brings together Young & Human’s conceptual design sensibilities and WRST Collective’s experimental approach, turning the installation into a dynamic space where visitors trigger and shape audio elements through movement and interaction.
Whether you’re a producer, musician, a visual artist, a curious beginner, or simply someone who loves music, this installation transforms Cairo Tower into a space where creativity becomes visible, where sound stops being abstract and becomes something you can touch, shape, and co-create.
By blending tactile components with responsive digital systems, the work embodies the essence of a phygital experience: collapsing the boundaries between virtual and real while inviting audiences to explore sound as both a physical presence and a digital behavior. As part of Cairo Design Week, the installation adds to the city’s growing landscape of forward-thinking, tech-driven creativity, offering a vivid example of how design, audio, and interactivity converge.
The layered tech-integrated platform where sound, design, and youth creativity merge into one living system. Spread between the plaza at the base of Cairo Tower and the rotating 50th floor above it, the experience transforms the landmark into a vertical music laboratory: a place where sound is heard, broken apart, rebuilt, and reborn in real time.
Young & Human frames this installation as its first phygital co-creation station, a space created to commercialize youth talent through hands-on experimentation, while WRST, the independent art group founded in 2022, steps into Cairo Design Week with a mission to reimagine how people hear, see, and engage with music.
At the plaza before entering the tower, the two teams curate a sound-medium exhibition that charts the transformation of listening from 1918 gramophones to iPods to VR headsets. This outdoor gallery allows visitors to test how technology has transformed the way we hear music: analogue warmth, magnetic tape hiss, compressed digital files, and spatial audio.
The installation becomes a hands-on living timeline designed to make visitors feel the evolution of audio rather than simply observe it. Interactive games extend the experience; some mimic a physical form of Guitar Hero, where visitors replay tracks by moving through the space and selecting stems, while others recreate Foley sound design, letting participants craft cinematic effects and then record them as samples.
Up on the 50th floor, visitors enter Studio 50, a living production studio suspended above Cairo. Surrounded by glass, the entire rotating floor becomes a panoramic broadcast room where WRST hosts live-streamed creative and educational sessions. The floor transforms into a transparent studio, floating over the city and fully visible from every angle. Two external screens outside the studio display everything happening inside, one shows a live camera feed, and the other shows the producer’s screen in real time with details of every layer, every stem, every creative decision.
Within Studio 50, WRST structures the station around interconnected creative pathways. Daily collaborative sessions bring together producers, vocalists, songwriters, and musicians, allowing participants to witness (or join) the making of a song from idea to pre-master. These sessions are streamed live on TikTok and other platforms and later published as a Masterclass-style archive intended to showcase transparency rather than performance. WRST artists also reopen past projects to dissect stems, sound design choices, and production methods, offering a rare look into how their tracks were originally built.
Parallel to this, engineer Nour Abbas leads live mixing and mastering sessions broadcast remotely from Studio 19 in Maadi, demonstrating EQ decisions, balancing, troubleshooting, and final-stage mastering in real time. On the same floor, a dedicated ‘Synth Corner’ serves as a playground for sound, giving visitors hands-on access to analog and digital synthesizers where you can record ideas, experiment with textures, or book consultancy sessions with WRST artists for professional feedback.
Young & Human frames the entire installation around accessibility and talent development so applications operate on a point-based system, and the first 50 accepted participants receive three free days of access to the Co-Creation Station.
Founded in 2022, WRST functions not as a traditional company but as a living artistic community. It brings together producers, musicians, sound engineers, and visual artists to develop sustainable, collaborative workflows outside the pressures of the commercial industry. At its core, the collective pushes new directions in Egyptian electronic sound — indie, electronic, and shaabi hybrids — through experimentation, knowledge-sharing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
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