10:00 minutes, colour, Digital moving image
Lucky's voice, is an AI voice model trained on online polemical rants reading from collaged texts. Here instead of as can often be the case with Ai work where the human reads out the machine generated text it is the machine voice that performs the human.
In this work an AI cloned voice challenges notions of the conventional academic register. The essay has become synonymous with a reading of the world and our understanding of it as a coherent, fathomable whole, a neatly navigated thesis that charts an arc of inevitable trajectory to mirrored conclusion. The tyranny of this register is that all other meanings must be negotiated through its lingua franca. A linear normative logic that bends and subjugates the tangential, the wayward and the transcendental to its purview.
Here the essay is a more unruly beast. Neither wholly textual, sonic or visual, but rather an insolent jumble of noises, references, fragments and connections. Narration, soundtrack, text and image, slip and trip, in a collage logic of hypertextual interstitial thinking. A digital ‘Disjecta Membra’ of filched fragments and disjointed references. A stochastic dance of triggered neurons. Here a defiantly insubordinate logic is constructed and performed. Ai enhanced pixelated fragments, collaged words and scavenged cloned voices conspire to invert the dynamic of reading from the script by co-opting, parodying and puppeting. An inverse karaoke, in which new freedoms are glimpsed rather than old ones enacted. Here the formal essay is critiqued in both form and content. Academia presented not as it would like to see itself as the maker of meaning and guardian of new knowledge, but rather an all too often ‘Empty Orchestra’, a pre-scripted performance of compliance, a bouncing ball of conformity. A mummers play of foregone conclusions and acceptable opinions, an intellectual Karaoke.
The ideas voiced in Spectral Karaoke are the result of an ongoing collaboration with antivoid alliance members Caleb Madden, Tiago de Souza and Grant Cieciura.