Re-writing / Re-reading

12th Mar 2022 12th Mar 2022 14:00 17:00

Jonathan Chaim Reus and Varia

00:00

OnlineWorkshop full / Registration closed

1

  • Jennifer Walton

    UK

    The London-based producer and composer, who has toured extensively with the band Kero Kero Bonito, warps electronic tropes into a dizzying body horror.

  • VARIÁT

    UA/DE

    The new experimental project of pioneering Ukrainian multimedia artist Dmytro Fedorenko wraps dissonant noise poetry, corrosive synthesis, and folk songs into a sound world of austere urban psychedelia.

    • How would you like an artificial reader to read? What kind of memory is preserved in an algorithm? What knowledge, thoughts, feelings would you want to be a part of such processes, and what previous »machine learnings« could be refused?

    Image: Joana Chicau

    In this workshop we will explore the potentials of hybrid algorithmic and collective reading through inventive practices of annotation. Starting from the written and spoken words of the artificial broadcaster in »In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit,« we will investigate how to understand and digest text generated by machine learning algorithms, and how such artificial writing can be read next to and together with new text of our own choosing.

    Everyone attending the workshop will be asked to bring a piece of writing that has influenced the way they think about prediction, lineage and thinking towards the long future, or simply a piece of writing that they wish to better understand. Then together we will explore collective methods for reading »annotatively« that can then become possible strategies for guiding artificial voices.

    The workshop will be led by artists from Varia, a collective infrastructure who have been developing experimental approaches for reading and annotation. Annotating texts as we read is a practice shared by many, we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up words, take notes, in order to make a text more accessible. Annotation also potentially becomes a corrective method for interpreting past texts, so that they might be more valuable within a present context, or, in the case of a deep learning system - such as those that generate artificial words and voices - annotation can be used as a collective approach for shepherding words and meaning - as we intervene by undoing, relearning and rewriting.

    »In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit« is a year-long experiment in generative radio by Jonathan Chaim Reus. An artificial BroadCaster, a bespoke voice synthesis system utilizing current deep learning techniques in voice synthesis and style transfer, shifts through speech and song, words and soundscapes, reading through text as if tracing slowly over the letters, probing them and unsettling them.

    The BroadCaster performs words produced by a predictive process. Beginning with a small set of texts, including virologist Jonas Salk’s 1977 speech »Are we being Good Ancestors?,« and expanding through the year, it tries to predict what words should come next based on its previous and current memory. Ideas of long-term thinking, wrapped up in human activities of prediction, risk analysis, and adaptation happen at many levels of society and individual consciousnesses. How do we make decisions today, navigating the many layers of uncertainty about the long-term future we are a small part of? The work can be streamed yearlong via http://ahnen.in.

    »In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit« is commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, CTM Festival, and ORF Ö1 Kunstradio. The workshop series surrounding the work is supported by CTM Festival, Sussex Humanities Lab, and Platform for Thought in Motion (The Reading Room).