PopUp Academy: Prompting Polyphonic Futures
14/11/2024
19:00 – 22:00
MU Hybrid Art House
Cost: €6 for regular visitors, free for students
More info and tickets HERE

Now that OpenAI can recreate human voices and text-to-speech technology is rapidly advancing, voice AI is changing the role speech plays in our daily lives. But what does it actually mean to synthesize a human voice? What happens when we create a ‘digital twin’ or voice clone that can make calls for us or even attend meetings? It’s important to consider the values behind voice AI: what data is used to train these systems, and what remains invisible? How will this technology affect the way we speak and communicate? In Prompting Voices, we explore these questions through performances and Q&As.

Jonathan Reus, a transmedia artist and musician, will perform iː ɡoʊ weɪ, as part of his ongoing practice of hybrid vocal work. In this performance, Jonathan attempts to use his voice, transformed by real-time AI systems, as a way to embody various bodies, emotions, and expressions — navigating the fragile yet powerful connections between voice and the feeling of being a singular, but connected, body.

Salim Bayri introduces Hadra Collider, a speculative machine developed by Salim Bayri, Tayeb Bayri and Megan Hoetger, that uses speech-to-text AI technologies to bring the misheard, accidental, and discarded to the surface. When using speech-to-text AI, how does the system rank and select the word it thinks you’re saying? And what about all the possible words it leaves behind? Exploring these concepts hopes to allow the audience to look beyond the intent in the chaos of algorithms.

Onuitgesproken, the young and most rebellious spoken word platform in Brabant, joins the program with performances that emerged from workshops they conducted with Jonathan Reus. Onuitgesproken daringly mixes spoken word with other live art forms, leading to bold, experimental literature events.