Sounds of Liberty enters a long-standing art-historical dialogue where artists have used the American flag to interrogate national identity. It updates this tradition for the digital age, moving beyond the material questions of Jasper Johns's encaustic  

Flag paintings or the socio-political critiques of David Hammons's African-American Flag. While artists like Dread Scott have used participation to create a physical platform for dissent, Harris's work posits that the contemporary threat to the symbol's integrity is informational. The flag's dissolution is caused not by physical desecration but by an overload of decontextualized data, reflecting a uniquely 21st-century anxiety about the nature of truth itself.  

The work is also a significant evolution within Dominic Harris's own practice. It builds directly upon his World Stage series (2020), which first used butterfly swarms to construct national flags that would disperse in response to the viewer's presence.  

Sounds of Liberty deepens this concept by integrating live data feeds and AI-generated audio, shifting the focus from a general meditation on identity to a specific and urgent critique of the media landscape. Harris, whose background is in architecture , uses his technological "palette" of code and sensors to create responsive environments , and here he applies that skill to a political and conceptual end. His career-long use of the butterfly as a symbol of fragility and metamorphosis is imbued with new, critical weight, suggesting a national identity as delicate and mutable as the creatures that form it.