20-29/05/2022 TBD
Morphine Raum, CTM Festival, Berlin
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/NhMyUTBjuE1k3kxT9
With Jonathan Chaim Reus, Eleni Ikoniadou, and Varia

“My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry”

Nikos Kazantzakis

In this workshop we will experiment with audibility in relation to text to speech tools and voice synthesis, to consider the perceptible and imperceptible messages we might want to pass on to future human and non-human ears. Through using our own voices, and collaborating with artificial ones, we will attempt to tease out the features and meanings of voice in the digital domain, and consider the audible sensibilities we may want to attune with as we co-create a hybrid chorus.

Our intention through the workshop is to experiment with artistic approaches to reading and voicing together, in order to develop contributions to the machine learning models of the artificial broadcaster in >>In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit<< – who is learning to speak through listening to human and non-human voice recordings. 

We will investigate forming rhythms, flow, tension and narrative with our own voices, together and alongside the artificial voices of these algorithms. What is audible and what is silenced within such machine learnings? What vocalizations do we want to listen more closely too? When do we mute? When do these voices silence and cacophonize one another, or blend 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 messages towards the long future. These can be, for example, sound recordings and/or text to read out loud during the workshop. These will be our raw material for vocalizing, listening, voice transformations and cloning, as strategies for projecting ourselves into future (in)audibility.

The workshop will be led by artists from Varia, a collective infrastructure who have been developing artistic approaches for reading, annotating, speaking and listening together across different open source softwares.

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. 

>>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 Jonas Salk’s essay “Are we being Good Ancestors?”, it tries to predict what words should come next based on its previous memories. Ideas of long-term thinking, wrapped up in human activities of prediction, risk analysis, and memory happen at many levels of human society and individual consciousness. 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 is commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, CTM Festival, and ORF Austrian Broadcasting Service.

Workshops Supported By CTM Festival, Sussex Humanities Lab & Platform for Thought in Motion (The Reading Room)