Remnants of Future Voices

10th Dec 2022 10th Dec 2022 14:00 17:00

Jonathan Chaim Reus and Varia

00:00

Free with registration

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.

    • This third and final workshop around Jonathan Chaim Reus's commissioned work will bring together activities from previous workshops and revisit the broadcasted work as it approaches the end of its lifetime.

    Image: Jonathan Chaim Reus

    »When we walk upon Mother Earth, we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground.« – Chief Oren Lyons,  address to the United Nations (1992)

    »it’s easy to mistake distance for unreality, to treat the limits of what we can see as the limits of the world. But just as the world does not stop at our doorstep or our country’s borders, neither does it stop with our generation, or the next.« – William MacAskill, What we Owe the Future (2022)

    »I’ve dreamed of looking into a mirror and seeing my alter ego which, on its own initiative, begins to tell me unbearable truths.« – Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)

    In this workshop we will explore ancestral cosmology through the figure of the clone in artificial voice technologies. The workshop will experiment with artistic approaches to future and past-oriented dialogues using voice avatars of ourselves and others, considering the implications of creating a clone that may speak to generations beyond our own lifetime and say things we have never said.

    Data. Memory. Prediction. What traces of our living selves remain within machine learnings? What aspects of identity would we want to preserve, or do we choose to allow our clones to take on a completely different identity? How do we encode wishes and messages that exceed both our temporary bodies and recorded data? How do we populate a data+algorithmic memory space with remnants that carry possible messages - to be ancestors, as opposed to ghosts?

    Everyone attending the workshop will be asked to consider their own relationship to an open-ended conception of ancestry, relating to the ideas and actions of those having lived and those yet to be. These reflections will take form through a series of small artistic contributions developed through the workshop. The artistic contributions are part of a process of collaboratively building datasets which are used to train the machine learning models of the artificial BroadCaster in the year-long radio broadcast In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit whose voices are shaped by learning the nuances of human and non-human recorded utterances.

    The workshop will be led by Jonathan Chaim Reus in collaboration with Angeliki Diakrousi from Varia, a collective infrastructure who have been developing artistic approaches for reading, annotating, speaking and listening together across different open source softwares.

    Call for Participants

    An call for workshop participants is out now, until 21 November 2022. First-come, first-served. Workshop participants will gather at Varia (Rotterdam, NL) on 10 December 2022 for the workshop. To register please use this link.

    Credits

    »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).