24.03.2023
12:45 – 13:45 UTC
Mozilla Festival, Online
Event Link: https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/QTHPSU-1

Many Voices: towards a shared vocal practice between humans and machines, Eleni Ikoniadou & Jonathan Reus

curated/organised by Sophia Bazile – AI Cosmologies

From Aristotle until the present, Western thought has defined the human as “the animal who speaks”, making the voice a powerful marker of identity. But with recent advances in artificial intelligence, computational research and application in the human-sounding voice has approached unprecedented levels of sophistication. Despite this newly shared skill between humans and machines, the voice has historically been interpreted as a cue to interiority, essence, and individuality. How then do we account for our algorithmic present, away from ideas of human-machine equivalence or algorithmic superiority, from the standpoint of the voice?

Artists and scholars Eleni Ikoniadou and Jonathan Reus will present work from their individual practices that investigates the value of approaching the voice from its plural and collective counterpart, voices. In Future Chorus, Eleni devises a polyphonic assembly of human and artificial voices lamenting, calling for the destruction of the primal Oneness of the tragic hero in the whole. Jonathan’s project Ahnen in Arbeit – In Search of Good Ancestors is a year-long experiment in generative radio exploring the possibilities of small vocal-data contributions to become part of a shifting, hybrid voice, searching and extending collected wisdoms from the past for living in the uncertainty of the present. Through our specific takes on lamentation, choral singing, and radio broadcasting, we are interested in bringing together thoughts around voice from many perspectives.

This session aims to bring together people in a moment of joyful study and vocal play. We also hope for this to be one small step in bringing together an international community across art-tech-cultural research on the topic of voice. Bring your appetite for voicing and playing with language, utterance, animal or creaturely sounds, mother tongues and mother songs, to ask what voices are and what they can do.