Territory Worldwide
All four pieces in the exhibition examine, make use of, and respond critically to the ambiguities of voice, sound, and sound technologies as symptoms of a problematic present, and as prophetic signs of approaching futures. Ventriloquism (from the Latin »to speak from the stomach,« and in English commonly called the ability to »throw« one’s voice), describes the art of appearing to speak from somewhere else, from a place, person, or object outside oneself. It also quite aptly describes the effects of advanced sound technologies. Music in particular is a world of technologically authored ventriloquism. Sound technologies allow the voice to literally be »thrown« into microphones, loudspeakers, synthesizers, and computer programs, such that it emerges in altered forms at any place and time, a ghostly double of the technologically superimposed singer. Recently, digital sound synthesis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have even made it possible to create voice models that are indistinguishable from the human original, and which can be played as instruments or voice puppets, or serve as speech organs of intelligent algorithms. At this point, any boundary between human subjectivity and technology ultimately has been blurred beyond recognition.
The effect of such sound technologies to question and unsettle the human self, to break it open, to multiply and expand it, is also evident in their aesthetic proximity to auditory hallucination, performative transformation, manifestations of disciplinary power, or religious and spiritual experiences. It is no accident that shifting and throwing the voice finds its origin not in the popular stage act of a human ventriloquist speaking through a puppet, but in early forms of religious and spiritual prophecy and in notions of demonic possession. The cultural core of ventriloquism is thus the deeply uncanny experience of contact with an otherness: one’s own unconscious, another subjectivity, a religious authority, non-human entities, or an as-of-yet unknown future.
The four sound pieces presented in »Ventrilogues« trace the insecurities resulting from such contacts. In their reflections on the anarchic release of artificial intelligence (»AAI«), empathetic machines (»Lovotic«), the mimetic doubling of man and machine (»Obsolescence«), and finally on the history of digital sound and voice synthesis itself (»Pulsar Synthesis«), it is the technologies penetrating into ever wider areas of the human that challenge traditional notions of human subjectivity and human society.
The works speculatively articulate fears, desires, and hopes in the face of the progressive dissolution of the boundaries between humans and technology, the subject and its other, and between internal and external activity. Don’t machine processes already shape us as much as we shape them? We speak through machines, but don’t they also speak through us? Does it at all make sense to try to distinguish the authentic from the artificial? Can we arrive at new ways of looking at ourselves and our world by questioning this dichotomy, and by recognising its politics and history? What changes when machines understand emotions and enter the most intimate realms of human feelings? What if knowledge and creation of robotics and artificial intelligence could grow and mutate beyond the instrumental reasoning of states and corporations? Finally, what becomes possible when machines and computer programs are released from their hierarchical relationship of dependence to us?
Commissioned and produced by CTM Festival 2021, funded by the NEUSTART KULTUR VERANSTALTER:INNEN & FESTIVAL programme of Initiative Musik with funding by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Supported by Meyer Sound, IT Audio, Deutschlandfunk – Hörspiel/Klangkunst.