Flesh of Words
Oh! Blessed rage for order,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds
Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West
This Monday, November 10th, we open our latest work, Flesh of Words (Swedish title Sägningsväsen), on the first floor of Kulturhuset, Stockholm. Join us at 4 PM for the opening reception, followed by drinks and mingling. RSVP here.
This project is our latest exploration into technologically mediated human communication. The work consists of a 5 x 2 meters large prosodic mirror – prosody being the study of the non-textual qualities of speech; pitch, volume, rhythm, cadence – that reflect what you say in front of it. Your words take shape, not as text, nor as renditions of their meaning, but as the material creatures carrying this meaning.
Flesh of Words is a part of the exhibition Rum för Språk (Room for Language) at Kulturhuset, and is a commission by Språkmuseet, The Swedish Museum for Languages. This museum is not yet built, and as a lead-up to its future realisation, it appears as a pop-up museum at various locations across the capital. We are honoured to be commissioned to create an artwork for the very first of these.
Patrik Hadenius, founder of Språkmuseet, reached out to us in late 2024 with an idea for a collaboration. We soon realised that although we work in different niches, our key interests point in the same direction; a deeper look into communication as a fundamental aspect of life. Throughout his various projects, Patrik elevates Language as a foundational aspect of society and a subject worthy of as much praise as culture, which aligns well with our probing into how technology mediates and shifts this language, and what new forms of human relations this enables.
This artwork continues the research from our previous projects, in particular Interspatial Echoes and Garden of Ghost Flowers. In Interspatial Echoes, we combined the asynchronicity and timelessness of digital communication with the spatiality and presence of standing on a street corner gossiping with your friends. In Garden of Ghost Flowers, we combined data visualisation with real-time voice interaction to shift the perception of our self as being centred in the body to being centred in the voice.
Flesh of Words draws on these explorations, while posing the core question in a more simple way: if we leave meaning behind, what does communication look like? What shape does a word have? What is the materiality of speech?
Language is the malleable bond that binds us together. Without it, civilisation would not be. It is the connective tissue of society. This tissue is made out of air, a materiality fundamental to both our survival and our communication. In that sense, it is a shared flesh – what Merleau-Ponty once framed as ‘the flesh of the world’ – a shared organ between all lunged creatures. An organ both in the intestinal and musical sense; an instrument we play to communicate with each other ~ words are vibrational creatures, born by us shaping air.
Through technology we transpose these words to new materialities; stone, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, pixels. This transposition changes their materiality, tone and presence are lost, while asynchronicity and timelessness are gained. Can we find ways of transposing the body – the non-conceptual flesh, the mucus, the ligaments – of our words into these new mediums?
The prosodic mirror is powered by a speech-to-shape pipeline consisting of a series of locally hosted AI models that analyse speech in real time and define the shapes and colours. The result is a digital canvas where you paint with your speech.
Flesh of Words will be exhibited at Kulturhuset until early 2027. We look forward to sharing this work with you on Monday.
Many thanks to Patrik Hadenius, Sofia Malmgård and the rest of the team at Språkmuseet, lead architect and best dressed man in Stockholm, Peter Ullstad, our intern Ignacio Roulet who appeared as a saving angel in the last minute, Lior Nønne Malue Hansen and her precise metalwork, Francis Patrik Brady for his thoughtful ideas on how to get people to speak, and to everyone who has helped us test the work throughout the production period.
See you in Stockholm
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