Naturally Speaking

 At the exhibition from October 20, 2017 to August 5, 2018

»NaturallySpeaking« takes form as an experimental essay, which advances a few propositions: First, that we are assuming increasingly oral relationships with our devices; that orality does not just denote vocal speech, but also various forms of writing facilitated by social media platforms; that our voice recognition devices often elicit flat, nonaffective registers of speech, thus transforming communication into a process by which one is rendered communicable to machines; and, finally, that affective, nonlinguistic, and vibratory sounds exceeding programmatic registers might contribute to the »unsovereign, unintelligible speech« that, Dina Al-Kassim writes, periodically gathers itself into a »counterdiscourse«.

Practically, this essay intervenes in the standard training script of Macintosh speech recognition software, retelling famous stories of the births and afterlives of the voice. On an adjacent monitor, a screensaver tracks the melting of an ice sculpture of Pantagruel’s ship.