Research Catalogue

In the ongoing collaborative work Sensory Cartographies, Sissel Tonn and Jonathan Reus explore the relationships between consciousness, body and environment, as mediated by mechanisms and sense technologies.

iː ɡoʊ weɪ is my ongoing practice of hybrid voice work, since about 2021, where I try to use my voice, transformed through real-time “AI” systems, as a way of inhabiting different kinds of bodies, emotions, expressions – and navigating the fragile but powerful connections between voice and sense of being a single, but connected, body. My vocal work mostly explores abstract voice sounds, in the tradition of dadaist phonetic poetry, alongside techniques from across vocal genres and traditions such as deep humming chants, the cries and shouts of American folk/traditional music and death metal growls. Past performances have used my own notation systems, notations generated by “AI” systems, and fragments of sound poems such as Kurt Schwitters’ ‘Die Sonata in Urlauten’ (Ursonate). As the performance progresses I play with the tension between my biological voice, augmented and transformed by real-time voice transfer models. I begin by performing with and through a clone of my own voice that soon assimilates fragments of the voices of others. My goal is to create a voice that celebrates the unraveling of voice as a marker of individuality and identity connected to a specific body, moving onward, dissolving and coalescing into multi-human, polyphonic, choral and alien forms. In these performances I use AI models trained on different voice datasets that I have created myself, or together with artists. This is a sensitive and intimate process as well, as a vocal dataset is the documenting of an artist’s voice in a unique way, a snapshot of a specific moment in their physiological life. Yet a dataset is also something that extends beyond the artist, their body, and even might escape their control. In recent performances, as the world seems to turn increasingly violent, and the voices of those suffering from this violence made increasingly audible across social media landscapes, I have been finding it an important part of witnessing and grieving to work with those cries as well, to hear them but also attempt, in some small way, to feel them through my own bodily vibrations.

Discourse and materials pertaining to the experimental iteration with Jonathan Reus, during the Algorithms that Matter (Almat) artistic research project.