Prompting Polyphonic Futures

With OpenAI launching their voice AI model that can create custom voices, and text-to-speech generators developing at hyper-speed, it seems that voice AI technologies are set to reshape how we think about the voice in our daily lives. But what does it really mean to synthesise the human voice? Or to create a ‘digital twin’ or voice clone that can make calls for you and sit in on your meetings? When it comes to voice AI, we need to explore the value systems that underpin its development. What data is the model trained on and what gets left behind in these training processes? How will voice AI reshape language and how we speak? During this evening program we’ll engage with these questions and experiments with voice AI technologies through performances and talks.

Visual artist and polyglot Salim Bayri will be sharing his work Hadra Collider—a speculative voice-to-text machine that he developed, in collaboration with Tayeb Bayri and Megan Hoetger, from imagining a particle accelerator (Hadron Collider) that functions inside someone’s throat. Hadra here can be 8adra (الهضرة), which in Moroccan Darija means ‘talk’, or it can be 7adra (حضرة), which means both presence and procession. In this shift from ‘talk’ to ‘presence’ to ‘procession’ the Hadra Collider brings to the surface the misheard, accidental, and discarded to be able to see beyond intention amidst the chaos of algorithms.

Jonathan Reus, a transmedia artist and musician, will be performing iː ɡoʊ weɪ, part of his ongoing practice of hybrid voice work. In this performance Jonathan plays with the tension between his biological voice, augmented and transformed by real-time voice transfer models—creating a voice that celebrates the unraveling of voice as a marker of individuality and identity connected to a specific body.

The program will be punctuated by short performances from Onuitgesproken that emerged from workshops with Salim Bayri and Jonathan Reus during the day, and will conclude with a conversation with Salim and Jonathan, moderated by Margarita Osipian, further exploring their work, voice as data, and the emerging questions around voice AI.

This event is part of the public program for the Poetics of Prompting exhibition, a collaboration between The Hmm and MU Hybrid Art House. Poetics of Prompting brings together 21 artists and designers who explore the languages of the prompt from different perspectives and experiment in multiple ways with AI. In their work, machines’ abilities and human creativity merge. Through new and existing works, interactive projects, and a public program filled with talks, workshops and film screenings, this exhibition explores the critical, playful and experimental relationships between humans and their AI tools.

📅 Date: 14 November 2024
🕗 Time: 19.00 – 22.00 CEST
📍 Location: MU Hybrid Art House, Torenallee 40-06, 5617 BD, Eindhoven
🎟 Tickets: Available via MU (€6 regular, free for students)