v01ces – The Human Voice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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The feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti describes the voice as ‘a unique audio footprint of the human soul.’ However, nowadays many voices that sound human, such as those of voice assistants, are artificially generated. Current deepfake voices or ‘voice clones’ go one step further by making voices say things they never said: ‘You have a missed call from your dead mother’ was the title of a recent article in Die Zeit on the topic of ‘grief tech.’ Sinister: the ‘voice clones’ sound like the real voices they imitate.

This is even more confusing and uncanny as was the separation of the human voice from the body that produces it, which first became possible with the invention of the phonograph – 1877 patented by Thomas Alva Edison as the ‘talking machine.’ In the 1960s, Canadian composer R. Murray Schaefer coined the word ‘schizophonia’ for a sound detached from its original 
context by means of electro-acoustic reproduction.

V01ces is an exhibition about the (human) voice in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is pattern recognition in large amounts of data plus machine learning or conditioning, respectively. Accordingly trained systems cannot only imitate voices, but recognise languages and accents – and they can classify and evaluate these according to, among other things, age, ethnical background, gender, economic status.

From different perspectives, the artists paint a disturbing picture of the (human) voice in the age of AI. At the end of the two-year VOICE:over project series we are at the beginning of the era after the oral turn.

Curated by Inke Arns

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Programme Series VOICE:over

The Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten’s VOICE:over programme series delves into various phenomena related to voice. With cross-disciplinary exhibition projects, performances and a multifaceted outreach programme, VOICE:over explores the changes in meaning and significance of physical and social forms of the voice – from screams to speech and song to artificial intelligences’ posthuman imitation of the human voice.

Supported by the federal programme “Neustart Kultur” of Stiftung Kunstfonds and by the multi-sector funding as well as the district funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

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