Five Variations of Phonic Circumstances and a Pause
Five “poetic actions in regard to machines” treat with great sensitivity the question of how technologies of all times have dictated relationships between orality and literacy, and created subsequent relationships of power. Each work is part of a discourse surrounding the culture of listening: the audible, acoustic technologies, the gesticulation of narration, the audible texture of the voice. The machines of Five Variations on Phonic Circumstances and a Pause are constituted as mechanisms whose particular use is processing sounds or, more precisely, phonic circumstances. The machines’ goal is to translate and interpret sound events – noises, orality, readings, narrations, murmurs, secrets, music – by changing them from one phonic register to another, transmuting them into text and code. These devices lie somewhere between science fiction, Victorian steam technology and the latest artificial intelligence and word processing technologies. The five variations refer constantly to a number of communication models and format transformations that create tension in the relationship between scientific knowledge and the human factor, and additionally emphasize the dislocation experience present in the expansive range of contemporary media. What part of a letter bears its sound? In what part of a musical note does the music reside? Is music a language? Can you speak of a code when speaking of poetry?
Organ
Complex oral language is exclusive to humans. Through history there has always existed a quest to imitate human voice mechanically. Organ is a machine that keeps this search alive. The choir, once occupied by an organ, is now mounted with a new organ, transformed into a talkative system. The machine has two keyboards: one musical and the other from a typewriter. When the carriage lever is released, the user can hear, through the use of a voice synthesizer, what has been written. In the musical keyboard, each key or chord has been programmed to produce the sound of a phonic syllable, giving voice to 1.200 syllables and resembling the language learning process. The machine is programmed to translate and interpret, and involves more than one semiotic system: the conversion of writing into orality and the conversion of orality into musical notation. The result is a system of artificial voice that redefines the sonorous dimension of language.
The opening will be on Thursday, October 9th 2014, at 15.00.
Open: every day from 12.00 to 14.00 and from 20.00 to 21.00
Maribor Parish – St. Mary – Franciscan church, entry from Vito Kraigher Street 2
Bio
Tania Candiani (Mexico City, 1974) is a Guggenheim scholarship fellow in the Creative Arts category and she is part of the Mexican National System of Creators since 2012.
