NaturallySpeaking, 2013 - 2015

Text, screensaver, monitors, furniture, floor paint, voice

NaturallySpeaking began as an experimental essay that used the training copy of Macintosh speech recognition software to retell famous stories of the voice: from Edison’s attempt to make his phonograph a device through which every sound in the history of the world again might be heard, to the robotic dogs and chatbots of early AI, and the scene in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel when the warming air thaws the frozen sounds of a past battle.

Practically, NaturallySpeaking has taken a few forms over the years. It was first commissioned for You Are Here: Art After the Internet (Cornerhouse Books, 2014), then became a two-monitor installation for the 2014 exhibition La Voix Humaine at Kunstverein Munich. (The essay runs on one monitor, and on the other, a screensaver charts the melting of an ice sculpture of Pantagruel’s ship.) In 2015, I invited Susan Bennett, the original voice of Siri, to read the essay live at Judson Church, New York. Given how Judson Dance Theater developed a vocabulary of pedestrian and task-based movement, it felt appropriate to have Apple’s greatest taskmaster occupy that site and lead listeners in a pseudo-training session.

Conceptually, NaturallySpeaking advances a few ideas: first, that we are assuming an increasingly oral relationship with our devices; that voice recognition software often encourages flat and nonaffective registers of speech, 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” which, according to Dina Al-Kassim, “sometimes gathers itself into a counterdiscourse.”

Installation view: La Voix Humaine, 2014, Kunstverein Munich

Susan Bennett, the original voice of Siri, reading NaturallySpeaking. Click here to view.

Part of User Agent, curated by Rachel Valinksy c/o NYPAC, March 29, 2015, Judson Church