An (In)audible Chorus

27th May 2022 27th May 2022 15:00 18:00

Jonathan Chaim Reus, Eleni Ikoniadou, and Varia

00:00

Morphine RaumFree with registration

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.

  • Edna Martinez

    CO/DE

    Based between Berlin and Cartagena de Indias, the DJ, curator, and artist from the Colombian Caribbean routes the Caribbean African and Arabic worlds.

  • 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.

    • Image: Jonathan Chaim Reus

    Our intention through the workshop is to experiment with artistic approaches to reading and voicing together, in order to collaboratively develop contributions to the machine learning models of the artificial broadcaster in »In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit« whose voices are shaped by learning the nuances of human and non-human recorded utterances.

    We will investigate forming rhythms, flow, tension and narrative with our own voices, together and alongside the artificial voices of these algorithms, and use the notion of (in)audibility as a cue for imagining how we might consider questions of what traces of our living selves are represented within such machine learnings. How does the artificial and disembodied voice of an algorithm cause us to listen more closely to our own vocalizations? And how do our voices operate in concert with others, sometimes silencing, sometimes contributing to a cacophony, and sometimes joining symbiotically into a chorus?

    Everyone attending the workshop will be asked to bring materials that have influenced the way they think about prediction, lineage, and projection of voiced towards the long future. These can be, for example, audio recordings and/or text to read out loud during the workshop. These will be our raw material for vocalizing, listening, voice cloning and transformations as strategies for projecting ourselves into the future (in)audibility of a dataset.

    The workshop will be led by Jonathan Chaim Reus in collaboration with Eleni Ikoniadou and artists from Varia (amy pickles, Cristina Cochior, and Joana Chicau), a collective infrastructure who have been developing artistic approaches for reading, annotating, speaking and listening together across different open source softwares.

    »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).