Remnants of Future Voices Workshop

Remnants of Future Voices Workshop

Event10.12.2022Varia, RotterdamcirculationA.I.collaborativedatahistorymachine learningsocial

10/12/2022
Varia, Gouwstraat 3, 3082 BA Rotterdam
12.00 – 17.00 (CET) including lunch break
More info HERE
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Artists: Jonathan Chiam Reus & Angeliki Diakrousi

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.

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<< ( ahnen.in ) 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.

>>In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit<< is a year-long experiment in generative radio by Jonathan Chaim Reus, investigating the nature of datasets and machine learning algorithms as unstable, intergenerational memory. A 24-hour broadcast on German Public Radio features the voice(s) of an artificial BroadCaster, a bespoke generative voice instrument utilizing deep learning text and speech models that begin pre-trained on widely used public research datasets. The BroadCaster mutates via trainings on small-scale datasets created collaboratively through a series of public workshops.

The broadcast streams from January 2022 – February 2023 at ahnen.in, while fragments are played intermittently on German Public Radio until end of December 2022. The workshops’ activities were conceived in collaboration with artist-researcher Eleni Ikoniadou, and Angeliki Diakrousi, Joana Chicau, amy pickles and Cristina Cochior of VARIA. This work is commissioned by CTM Festival, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF Ö1 Kunstradio, with additional support from the Leverhulme Trust.

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. http://varia.zone/

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