ART TRAVELOGUE is a new format, an audio/video journey with art as a destination. How does the journey to arrive at the art space inform our experience of the art work or exhibition? Does our own internal journey through life affect our perception of art? Embark on this trip with your host, Joana P. R. Neves.
Ft. Haroon Mirza, Yates Norton, Inês Costa.
In this episode you'll find out about British artist Haroon Mirza's new commissioned piece (a performance and a sound installation) for Focal Point Gallery's exhibition In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation . By travelling with our host, curator Joana P. R. Neves, you hear about the people, the seascapes, the urban areas, histories of Essex's estuary, through the scope of Mirza's translation of electric sounds from an older piece into human voices. This journey will be narrated by Joana, and interspersed with recordings of the artist, and the two curators of the exhibition, Inês Costa and Yates Norton. And finally, you'll arrive on site to experience the performance Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet.
→ To dig deeper into the episode's references and receive little gems, notes, and musings that didn't make it into the episode, SIGN UP: https://joanaprneves.substack.com/s/exhibitionistas
→ For our third season, we're working with intern production assistants for the first time. Your donations will contribute to pay for their work: https://exhibitionistaspodcast.com/support-us
With works from The David and Indrē Roberts Collection by: Horst Ademeit, Michael Armitage, Frank Auerbach, Charles Avery, Jonathan Baldock, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Neïl Beloufa, David Birkin, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Ulla von Brandenburg, Miriam Cahn, George Condo, Martyn Cross, Romany Eveleigh, Simon Fujiwara, Ellen Gallagher, Jim Goldberg, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Haroon Mirza, Francesca Mollett, Nika Neelova, Antoni Tàpies, Danh Vo, Ai Weiwei.Focal Point Gallery is South Essex’s only public contemporary art gallery, open to all. The David and Indrē Roberts Collection features nearly 2,500 works by over 900 artists, dating from the mid-20th century to today. Curated by Inês Costa (Focal Point Gallery) and Yates Norton (The Roberts Institute of Art).
Instagram: @focalpointgallery @therobertsinstituteofart @
To know more about Haroon Mirza: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/haroon-mirzahttps://www.youtube.com/@outputs_av
Key themes:
Sound; light; sound art; translation; performance art; music and sound; the singing voice; translating sound to voice; knowledge; wisdom; contemporary art; new technologies; generative technologies; AI; Essex county, communication; shamanism; non-verba communication; understanding versus experiencing; anticipation and experience; the Genesis and science; theories of creation; language; art languages; orality; the written word; histories; history as myth; faith, myth and science.
If you enjoyed the episode, you may enjoy Joana's essays on Substack: https://joanaprneves.substack.com
If you appreciate my work, why not buy me a coffee? It's a nice way to show your appreciation without having to commit to a membership: https://buymeacoffee.com/exhibitionista
For behind the scenes clips, links to the artists and guests we cover, and visuals of the exhibitions we discuss follow us on Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast
Bluesky: @exhibitionistas.bsky.social
exhibitionistaspod@gmail.com
#contemporaryart #immersive #artexhibitions #soundart #haroonmirza #exhibitionistas #exhibitionistaspodcast #joanaprneves #focalpointgallery #soundandlightart #performance #performanceart #choral #choirsinging #voice #translation #ai #aiandart #aiart #experimentalart
00:00:08
Art travelogues are episodes where I travel to see an artwork
00:00:13
or an exhibition. I describe my journey always
00:00:18
informed by what I'm about to see, what I know, what I do not
00:00:23
know, within this very particular configuration of my
00:00:27
movement in time and space, with art as a destination.
00:00:34
This inaugural episode of the series is brought to you as a
00:00:39
summer special episode and is dedicated to a commissioned
00:00:44
artwork by British artist Haroon Merza, who often works
00:00:49
collaboratively by creating a small community of very talented
00:00:54
people around a multifaceted project.
00:00:58
Sound, light, invisible energies made tangible technology and the
00:01:05
vehicle of our beliefs and faiths are elements at the heart
00:01:10
of his work. Artists often elaborate open
00:01:14
questions which stimulate a complex experience of embodied
00:01:19
music. This is what I try to share with
00:01:23
a mix of writing, sound and images for those watching on
00:01:26
YouTube or Spotify, and interviews with some of the
00:01:30
people involved, including the artist.
00:01:34
This new Commission is part of an exhibition titled In Other
00:01:39
Worlds Acts of Translation at Focal Point Gallery in Southend
00:01:44
on Sea with works from the David and Andrea Roberts Collection.
00:01:50
The show was conceived by in house curator Ines Kosta and
00:01:54
Yeats Norton, curator at the Roberts Institute of Art.
00:01:59
It has works by established but fascinating artists such as
00:02:04
Louis Bourgeois, Anthony Tapias, a beautiful Frank Auerbach, a
00:02:10
precious beautiful small painting by Miriam Khan and a
00:02:14
very very surprising painting by George Kondo.
00:02:18
As well as mid career artists equally fascinating such as
00:02:22
Francesca Mullet, Charles Avery, Neil Beloufa, Mark Bradford and
00:02:28
a quite incredible artwork by Danvo which is 2 sculptures, 1
00:02:36
medieval, the other one probably 2000 years old ensconced in one
00:02:41
another. One is obviously Madonna and the
00:02:46
other one a young male naked. The monstrous shape that is
00:02:56
presented to you, the wood of the Madonna is eaten up by time
00:03:02
and probably bugs, and the whole thing is held by this very
00:03:08
precisely produced strip of metal that accompanies the shape
00:03:13
of the sculptures and holds them.
00:03:17
It is in some ways a very good image of what this episode is
00:03:24
because it really encapsulates this monstrous creature that is
00:03:30
our culture across times, across geographies, across faiths and
00:03:35
across rebellions as well. And I absolutely loved it.
00:03:41
So in the same room you will have every 15 minutes as well
00:03:48
the piece that Harun Merza produced for the exhibition and
00:03:53
that I watched as a performance on the 5th of July of this year
00:03:59
2025, which is called Adam, Eve Others and a UFO for Choral
00:04:06
Octet. It plays every 15 minutes.
00:04:08
The exhibition is really worth the trip, I can tell you that.
00:04:13
And the trip is very pleasant, as you will find out.
00:04:17
So this is Exhibitionistus. If you're new here, I'm Joanna
00:04:22
Pierre Nevis, contemporary art curator and writer, and I'll be
00:04:26
your host for the next 40 minutes or so.
00:04:30
You will also hear other voices which will complement or expand
00:04:34
my own perspective of the exhibition and the particular
00:04:39
performance and piece that I will be focusing on.
00:04:43
And this is the first art travelogue episode at Focal
00:04:48
Point Gallery. Enjoy.
00:04:56
The destination. Southend on Sea sounds distant,
00:05:01
but it's barely an hour away from London.
00:05:04
As usual, before leaving, I check the journey.
00:05:07
I look online for information about the area.
00:05:11
You go to Fenchurch Street station or Liverpool station in
00:05:14
East London and you take the railway train straight to your
00:05:18
destination. You journey in the straight line
00:05:22
while the Thames snakes along eastward onto the marshes north
00:05:27
of the estuary where the river meets the North Sea.
00:05:31
I know that if I were to continue E, if my train floated
00:05:35
away in the same direction, crossing the waters, soon enough
00:05:40
I'd leave the United Kingdom behind and reach the shores of
00:05:43
the Netherlands. This is where my mind goes when
00:05:48
I set off towards the shore, any shore.
00:05:51
Especially because here, on paper, everything draws
00:05:54
attention to it. The very literal name South and
00:06:00
on Sea, where the northern lands stopped by the blue-green and
00:06:04
brown width of the delta. Then there's the name of the
00:06:09
gallery, Focal Point, aptly named for a cultural space.
00:06:14
The focal point is the focus of attention, but it's also the
00:06:18
point to which light and sound waves converge, modulated by
00:06:23
sunsets and sunrises, solstices and equinoxes, winds and tides
00:06:30
washing over tidal creeks, salt marshes and mud flats.
00:06:36
The website Focal Point Gallery has an unusual piece of
00:06:39
information at the bottom of the page.
00:06:47
Tide times low tide 3:20 AM and then 4:01 PM and high tide 9:48
00:06:57
AM and then 10:13 PM. The riverscape is quite
00:07:02
dramatic. It expands and withdraws, but
00:07:05
the gallery doesn't face the sea.
00:07:07
It's closer to South End Victoria train station, whose
00:07:11
line runs along the beaches leading you into this atypical
00:07:15
seaside town. The gallery is nestled between
00:07:19
the station and the High Street, leading to the quote World's
00:07:24
longest pleasure pier UN quote Waves of light of sound.
00:07:35
Well, perhaps of notice because I'm going to South End to watch
00:07:39
a performance. Parts of British artist Haroon
00:07:42
Mercer's new Commission for the current group exhibition at the
00:07:45
gallery. And if anything has moved him,
00:07:49
it's the alchemy of sound and light and their technologies,
00:07:52
from prayer balls to speakers mixing tables, LED contraptions
00:07:57
to cables. When I asked him if he could
00:08:00
pinpoint the moment when he was drawn to the relation between
00:08:04
sound and a visual or light element, he remembered the
00:08:08
parties his family organized with musicians.
00:08:11
But he also recalled another, far more intriguing episode.
00:08:14
I was exposed to quite a lot of music as a kid, I guess from my
00:08:17
particularly my dad. My parents used to throw Kwali
00:08:20
parties. You know, they didn't invite
00:08:22
musicians saying classical Indian music.
00:08:25
I think I can pinpoint where I had this desire for like
00:08:30
connecting the visual to the acoustic.
00:08:33
So I remember very clearly as a kid, if we were travelling
00:08:37
somewhere in the car and there was, and my dad was stopped at a
00:08:43
red light and he'd have his indicator on to turn right.
00:08:46
You can hear the sound of the indicator.
00:08:49
And I'd look for other cars that might be In Sync with the my
00:08:53
dad's indicator to see if you know, they're flashing at the
00:08:56
same time. But it was very rare that it
00:08:58
happened because all these indicators have different relay
00:09:00
switches that's that tick at a different speed.
00:09:03
So it was very rare that you'd get this synchronicity.
00:09:06
But then when you did, when I did see it, it was like this
00:09:09
kind of cool thing. On the 5th of July, I'm not
00:09:17
headed to Focal Point Gallery, but the Clifftown Theatre which
00:09:21
is where the performance is to take place.
00:09:23
Art is always about the displacement of expectations to
00:09:26
exactly where they should be. The Clifftown Theatre is an old
00:09:31
church and the performance is called Adam, Eve, Others and a
00:09:36
UFO for Choral Octet. I don't know yet that I'll be
00:09:41
sitting in a hybrid performative space with the remnants of faith
00:09:45
rituals welcoming another embodied experience of text and
00:09:49
notation. Little do I know how appropriate
00:09:54
this venue will turn out to be. I also learn in my research that
00:09:58
Clifftown Centre is the famous drama school E15, with whom
00:10:03
Haroon and his sound and music team collaborated.
00:10:09
When you arrive at South End on Sea, there is a big modern
00:10:12
building, seemingly abandoned, and you're greeted by the back
00:10:16
of a brick edifice with giant letters announcing Odeon, a
00:10:20
cinema most likely. I learned that South End is far
00:10:25
up in the list of areas with the highest population density in
00:10:29
the UK, and it occurs to me that I didn't think about the people
00:10:33
living there at all until we arrive, leave the station, and
00:10:38
walk among the crowd toward the shore.
00:10:41
The curator, Ines Kosta, was attracted precisely to the
00:10:45
demographics of the space and how history reflects them.
00:10:49
I'd say Essex is a lump for experimentation.
00:10:52
You know, you have like some of the first nudist colonies showed
00:10:55
up in Essex. You had plot lands and this idea
00:10:59
of people building their own houses, alternative communities
00:11:02
that would look like there's a community called the Ethona,
00:11:04
like communities that looked to like sort of, you know, be self
00:11:07
sustainable. So there is a history, many,
00:11:10
many interesting histories, you know, like worker times.
00:11:13
The butter factory was in near Basildon.
00:11:16
Basildon is a new town. So there's like all these kind
00:11:18
of ebbs and flows of different kind of very radical ideas, very
00:11:22
radical concepts that kind of brewed in Essex.
00:11:24
Inesh told me that the idea most people have of Essex comes from
00:11:28
the working class movement eastward to the factories and
00:11:32
the cheaper housing, and which originated what was later
00:11:36
labeled the Essex Man, a sort of working class type with money
00:11:40
but no taste. The term was created by the
00:11:43
historian journalist Simon Heifer, who was from Essex
00:11:46
himself, in an article for the Sunday Telegraph published in
00:11:51
the 90s titled Missus Thatcher's Bruiser, it coined this new
00:11:56
person voting Conservative, Young, industrious, mildly
00:12:01
brutish. The female counterpart of the
00:12:04
Essex man would be Ines, granted a peroxide blonde with enhanced
00:12:10
or altered features. Essex was labeled as the most
00:12:14
misunderstood county of the UKA phrase found on the gallery's
00:12:18
website and elsewhere, whose origin I couldn't find but seems
00:12:22
to have been released into people's minds by the
00:12:25
rehabilitating book Excellent Essex in Praise of England's
00:12:29
Most Misunderstood County by Gillian Darley, published in
00:12:33
2019. No wonder such a book had to be
00:12:37
written. Charles Dickens once described
00:12:39
Chelmsford, the administrative capital of Essex, as quote, the
00:12:44
dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth.
00:12:47
UN quote. It is a White County, as white
00:12:52
as the UK is a little more perhaps as soon as you step out
00:12:56
of London. The population was in the 2021
00:13:00
census, reported as being 87% white, less than over 90% a
00:13:07
decade before. But diversity is not only based
00:13:10
on ethnicity, as Inish suggested.
00:13:13
It's also a history of radical change, artistic invention and
00:13:17
technological integration. From the beginning the idea was
00:13:20
that we wanted to work with sound because South End, I mean
00:13:23
Essex, but South End as well have, you know, a very, very
00:13:27
long history of, of music and sound and you know, folk music
00:13:31
and rock music. I mean Depeche Mode are from
00:13:33
Basildon and you know, Echo Radio, which was, you know,
00:13:37
producing most of the radios in the UK.
00:13:39
Indeed, walking in the streets of South End, the population is
00:13:43
urban. You see an emo kit here,
00:13:45
normcore group there, a Caribbean family, quite a few
00:13:49
blonde middle-aged women. The population you find in the
00:13:52
outskirts of London once you move away from Hackney Pinner
00:13:56
was green. South End is not as pretty as
00:13:59
Choco Beach right before, or even Leon Sea, but there is an
00:14:03
intriguing landscape of marshes, beaches, river and sea waters,
00:14:09
not to mention the biodiversity of these protected areas.
00:14:13
So the basis of this misunderstanding lies somewhere
00:14:16
between what is lived, what is manifested through behaviour,
00:14:21
language, accent and how it is perceived truth being carried
00:14:26
through between contexts. It's a question of translation
00:14:30
within the same language across different times and places, from
00:14:34
the well spoken journalists to remnants of Cockney which now
00:14:38
translate into the world. Girl being pronounced girl.
00:14:42
In 1998, an 18 year old student from Essex was in the front
00:14:47
pages of the newspaper for having been ridiculed by a
00:14:50
Cambridge Don at her interview for a place at Trinity College.
00:14:55
Seeing a poem by TS Eliot with a line of Greek, the Don told her,
00:15:00
being from Essex, you won't know what these funny squiggles are.
00:15:04
The candidate left the interview in tears.
00:15:07
In 1992, an Angler University academic was commissioned to
00:15:12
write a report about the media treatment of Essex people.
00:15:17
Quote. In exploring the stereotype, we
00:15:20
discover more about the media than those it sought to depict.
00:15:24
UN quote. Language itself is translating
00:15:28
itself continuously. You know how words change
00:15:33
meaning, how they get used, how, how frequently they get used and
00:15:39
so on and so forth, and how that corresponds to other languages.
00:15:44
We're we're sort of always living in a sort of state of
00:15:49
translation anyway. The title of the exhibition at
00:15:52
Focal Point Gallery is In Other Worlds Acts of Translation.
00:15:57
So far. Either I'm influenced by the
00:16:00
theme or it fits the Essex condition perfectly.
00:16:03
Probably both. As Haroon suggested, Moving in
00:16:07
the world is a process of constant translation and being
00:16:11
translated. I also know that Adam, Eve,
00:16:14
Others and a UFO for Coral Octet, the performance piece I'm
00:16:18
about to watch, is a translation of an earlier work from 2013
00:16:23
titled Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO.
00:16:28
What a strange idea, quite geeky when you think about it.
00:16:31
To translate a work into another.
00:16:34
Will I encounter an umbilical project?
00:16:37
There is always a moment in translation where you're lost or
00:16:41
afraid you might be Adam. Eve, other than a UFO, is a
00:16:51
Sonic and sculptural installation whose title
00:16:54
involves the Abrahamic religions and the recount of the creation
00:16:59
on the 6th day God created humans.
00:17:02
The UFO opens up other possible theories of creation, but also
00:17:07
other concerns with technology. Who has it, could others have
00:17:11
it, and if so, would it be better than ours?
00:17:19
The focal point between both myths is a suspicion that there
00:17:23
may be a higher power hidden in the sky.
00:17:27
This, I suppose, are concerns for some people and not at all
00:17:31
for others, but through the fabric of our dreams and
00:17:34
nightmares. Or perhaps not, as I find out in
00:17:37
the train to Southend when I try to inspect my couple's
00:17:41
relationship to higher planes. Do you consider yourself
00:17:45
spiritual? This is the service to South End
00:17:49
Victoria Next station. I don't think I I, I I know.
00:17:56
What's? Spirit, spiritual means exactly
00:18:00
for me. I think in contradiction with
00:18:03
this idea of the prevalence of religion, or perhaps reinforcing
00:18:07
it. The origin of the title it turns
00:18:09
out, is the name of the devices used.
00:18:13
There are 8 different speakers in what seems to be a 4m circle,
00:18:17
one branded Adam, another Eve and the others are well, the
00:18:22
others referred to in the title. All the speakers, Adam, Eve and
00:18:28
the others, are turned towards an LED contraption whose
00:18:32
designation is UFO at the Centre, purchased from a certain
00:18:36
Steve, who sells them on his site Big projects.org.
00:18:41
It is the size and appearance of a bike light, with eight LEDs
00:18:45
displayed outward like a small sun.
00:18:48
Each LED is connected to a speaker whose electric current
00:18:52
either makes it flash, dims it, or brightens it, and is audible
00:18:57
through speakers in patterns programmed by her own.
00:19:01
The disposition of these almost anthropomorphic speakers toward
00:19:05
the centralized power unnerves me.
00:19:08
It itches right there where I stock memories of the
00:19:11
panopticon, the circular structures conceived by Jeremy
00:19:14
Bentham for architectures whose sole purpose is to express
00:19:18
surveillance and powerlessness. However, here the UF OS
00:19:24
invisible energy is manifested through music.
00:19:28
Electricity is made audible and rhythmic.
00:19:32
This may be, after all, about interpretation beyond language,
00:19:35
beyond perhaps dogma. Undoubtedly the work holds both
00:19:40
symbols, as usual in Haroon's work.
00:19:44
But maybe there is no symbol. The speakers aren't people,
00:19:47
they're technology. Receiving and distributing
00:19:49
energy outside of this organized system is, after all, the
00:19:53
Creator, the artist Haroon, and often a team of collaborators.
00:19:59
Another organised system, Not a unique God, but a composer in
00:20:03
the sense of detecting A tangible energy, receiving it
00:20:07
and delivering it in an organised form.
00:20:11
Thing with it, shaman is I don't see, I don't see shamanic like
00:20:16
shamanism as a practice any different to what a scientist
00:20:21
does or what a an artist does. Certainly an artist, right?
00:20:26
I mean, there's lots of commentators and scholars that
00:20:29
talk about contemporary art being like a modern day diluted
00:20:32
form of shamanism. And I don't see any difference
00:20:36
between what a, a priest or a, a, you know, a religious, you
00:20:42
know, sort of cleric or practitioner would would do.
00:20:45
And shamanism for me is just basically the engaging with the
00:20:49
other, whatever the other is some otherness that can't be
00:20:53
engaged with through language or through, you know, using a
00:20:57
phone. You can't call the other phone,
00:20:59
you know, like, and sort of getting, receiving some kind of
00:21:04
information and then and then materializing that information
00:21:08
and then communicating to the, to everyone else, right?
00:21:10
That's for me, that's the essence of shamanism.
00:21:13
You know, whatever the medium is, whether it's acoustic,
00:21:15
whether it's through making art, whether it's like through
00:21:18
healing or through discovering things or looking at particles
00:21:24
or whatever. So, but the shaman embodies that
00:21:26
in a very sort of sort of grounded earthly way, you know,
00:21:31
and deeply physical, you know, because this is the thing.
00:21:34
So physics, you know, if you talk to a physicist, they're
00:21:36
they always sort of at CERN, for instance, they talk about how
00:21:40
we're looking for we are and where we come from, how the
00:21:43
universe works and to answer all those questions.
00:21:45
But actually the reality is the more they, the more they kind of
00:21:48
dig deeper, the more it becomes more complicated.
00:21:53
And you know, so and, and they can, you can grow this whole
00:21:55
sort of tradition and practice, you know, that you can call
00:21:58
science or art around this thing, but the the shaman is
00:22:02
like the base of that, you know, alchemy and just grounded with
00:22:06
with nature. So for me, like there is no
00:22:08
difference between technology and nature.
00:22:10
Actually, you know, everything is or is man, you know, if it's
00:22:15
man made, let's say it's made by natural naturally occurring
00:22:20
things. That's so it's kind of, you
00:22:21
know, we're just taking things from around and mixing them
00:22:23
together. You know, it's like it's like
00:22:25
saying, is a pancake natural or is it technological?
00:22:28
You know, like you mix flour, milk and eggs and you get a
00:22:31
pancake, you heat it up, you know, it's alchemy, you know,
00:22:33
So, so that goes for anything for me.
00:22:37
I love how Haroon's work is made of connective, conductive and
00:22:41
reflecting elements. Copper mirrors, cables,
00:22:45
speakers, solar panels, photovoltaic cells, coding
00:22:50
screens, elements we hide in the walls behind skirting boards and
00:22:55
the gaffer tape. The cables, the speakers, the
00:22:58
little contraptions we know very little about, but which contain
00:23:02
the basics of communication and therefore translation beyond
00:23:07
language. Ursula K Le Guin wrote a
00:23:10
brilliant text called Telling Is Listening, where she compares
00:23:14
inter subjectivity with amoeba sex.
00:23:17
When amoebas don't simply divide, they sculpt their
00:23:21
pseudopodia into a tiny tube and connect to each other,
00:23:25
exchanging parts of their bodies.
00:23:28
This continuity is like Haroon's notion of shamanism, a physical
00:23:33
property called entrainment. If you place two pendulums next
00:23:37
to each other, she writes, they progressively attune to each
00:23:41
other until they synchronize. That's entrainment.
00:23:45
Quote. We vibrate amoeba or human, we
00:23:50
pulse, we move rhythmically, change rhythmically, we keep
00:23:54
time. You can see it in the amoeba
00:23:57
under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies under the atomic,
00:24:01
the molecular, the sub cellular and the cellular levels.
00:24:06
That constant delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life
00:24:10
made visible. We huge many celled creatures
00:24:14
have to coordinate millions of different oscillations,
00:24:18
frequencies and interactions among frequencies in our bodies
00:24:22
and our environment. Most of the coordination is
00:24:26
affected by synchronizing the pulses, by getting the beats
00:24:30
into a master rhythm, by entrainment and later being In
00:24:35
Sync internally and with our environment makes life easy.
00:24:40
Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous.
00:24:45
There is a bit of ableism, there is always a bit of dogma in
00:24:49
theory. Later in the text, Le Guin notes
00:24:53
that autistic people are believed to have difficulty with
00:24:56
entrainment, that they're out of sync.
00:24:59
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO contemplates the possibility of
00:25:04
any source of molecular vibration or electromagnetic
00:25:08
wave bringing their own rhythm. Le Guin here speaks for orality
00:25:37
and for inter subjectivity, almost against the book, which
00:25:41
she claims loses a dimension of the story, a part of its aura,
00:25:46
the book, that superpower of delay.
00:25:49
She wrote that in the book and I'm at my computer recording my
00:25:54
voice, thinking of dead authors, a living artist, an artistic
00:25:59
experience, and you listening. I'm doing what she calls second
00:26:04
orality communication in absentia.
00:26:09
But doesn't communication implicitly point at distance
00:26:13
being out of sync? Otherwise, why would we
00:26:17
communicate? If communication is accepting
00:26:20
distance, parallax, and even meanderings of meaning, then
00:26:25
translation is accepting defeat. It can even possibly celebrate
00:26:29
it. It felt quite important in the
00:26:32
in the title to to put in this word act because it is it is a
00:26:36
it's an act. It's something that is a kind of
00:26:38
a creative act, but also the in other worlds, which is obviously
00:26:45
a pun on in other words. In other words, that translation
00:26:50
also can maintain the, the, the untranslatable, the the
00:26:56
otherness of of of, of, of another language or another
00:27:00
culture or whatever it might be. And other does not in the sense
00:27:02
of in a kind of negative sense, but the what?
00:27:06
What cannot be reduced to a dominant language?
00:27:11
For example, isn't Eve a bad translation of Pandora?
00:27:15
The perfect woman who released all evils or emotions?
00:27:19
Depends on the source into the world by being too curious
00:27:23
that's what Natalie haynes's book Pandora's Jar tells us the
00:27:27
relation between truth and belief is something that has
00:27:30
been on haroon's mind going back to a biblical management of
00:27:34
power, pain, and hope through belief in the 2013 piece was
00:27:39
also picking up technology and its new role of establishing
00:27:43
truth we. Were interested in sort of
00:27:45
touching a upon communication beyond beyond language, like
00:27:49
written or verbal language, much more linked to sort of
00:27:52
established narratives, I guess, because it's much more linked to
00:27:55
to language itself. So written language and verbal
00:27:58
language. But in terms of like news, let's
00:28:00
say news or history books. And when we think about wisdom,
00:28:03
we think if something much that that kind of passes on through
00:28:08
generations or thinking more about crafts, we're thinking
00:28:11
more about like performance, you know, like rituals.
00:28:14
Like it's much more hyperlocal I think as well, you know, not
00:28:18
much more communal. The new work is a translation of
00:28:23
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO from its original form of coded
00:28:28
electrical signals into a school for human voice and clapping,
00:28:35
which reverses the relation of communication with technology.
00:28:42
Translating here took on the characteristic of embodiment and
00:28:46
presence of the synchronization Le Guin mentioned, but also a
00:28:50
deep understanding of communication as effort, care,
00:28:54
attention. In Haroon's case, it was a
00:28:57
question of collaboration, shattering the monolithic and
00:29:01
symmetric notion of creation that turns.
00:29:05
Out to 7A bar of seven, are you happy with that to be notated as
00:29:09
a bar of seven? Yes, 2 beats, yes.
00:29:11
OK, yeah. So that five four part is now
00:29:13
57. In these wordless translations,
00:29:18
we lose something, but we'll also gain something.
00:29:22
In his book. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
00:29:26
David Bellows explains how at times one must choose sound over
00:29:31
meaning, especially in poetry. When translating.
00:29:35
What is the priority in a deliciously rhythmic verse such
00:29:39
as Humpty Dumpty Sat on a wall? Meaning or rhythm?
00:29:44
How can you translate these exact words into French?
00:29:48
Bello uses the example of a translation giving priority to
00:29:54
sound and rhythm, and Putti Dumpty sit on Noel Humpty Dumpty
00:30:01
sat on a wall. In reality, this sentence means
00:30:06
a small of a small is astonished at the AL, which is a place.
00:30:10
Of course, practically this is not helpful.
00:30:13
ChatGPT, Google Translate have given us, I think, the false
00:30:17
impression that that there's a kind of answer to everything,
00:30:23
that language can be easily and quickly translated, that any
00:30:30
question you ask will give you an answer.
00:30:35
And this kind of code model to language falsely tells us that
00:30:43
like words disable carriers of meaning, that language is just
00:30:48
just this kind of conduit for information and communication is
00:30:54
just, it's just about decoding sort of these fixed units.
00:31:00
And of course that is just so not what any form of
00:31:03
communication is like. There's so many subtleties, so
00:31:07
many things that remain untranslatable.
00:31:10
We asked chat TBT all these questions and, and then it gives
00:31:13
us an answer very quickly and apparently seamlessly.
00:31:16
But it, it requires that enormous resource, which has
00:31:19
like a profound impact on the environment.
00:31:23
And I think we'd do well to remember that, you know, both
00:31:28
the pleasure and the labour and the resource that goes into
00:31:30
translation. Like translation makes demands
00:31:33
on us. It, it, it demands us to think
00:31:36
responsibly if we're doing it as humans and not, and not as as
00:31:41
computers. Like we have to think in
00:31:44
relation when we're translating. AI and Google Translate suggest
00:31:48
that translation is just a matter of creating equivalents.
00:31:51
And I think that's really dangerous because I think it it
00:31:56
it flattens and simplifies what communication really is about.
00:32:03
You translate a buzz as a note and the click as a clap, such as
00:32:07
Haroon did from his piece of 2013 into his piece of 2025.
00:32:14
To translate one work into another.
00:32:17
The first issue was to write the electric sound.
00:32:20
What kind of notation to use? Well, if.
00:32:23
I go back to the original work that this this piece stems from
00:32:27
Adam Eve other than a UFO that was translating code, you know,
00:32:31
to turn LEDs, light LEDs on and off into sound, you know, and
00:32:36
that was like a simple thing. I just connected the, you know,
00:32:39
speaker cables to the LEDs themselves and you hear the you
00:32:43
hear the electrical signals. But then then translating that
00:32:48
code, the program that drives those LEDs into a musical score
00:32:52
was obviously a big part of this, a big part of, you know,
00:32:56
that is a major sort of obvious translation.
00:33:00
But there's also this thing of coding decoding that comes into
00:33:04
it. So originally, I was going to
00:33:05
translate the code. I was going to do it, you know,
00:33:09
using, you know, computers. Basically, I was just going to
00:33:12
do it sort of digitally. So translate the code into a
00:33:16
MIDI file, right? So there's one thing.
00:33:19
And then that was going to go to another software that converts
00:33:21
it back into musical notation. But at that point, I, you know,
00:33:26
got in touch with Sam. And so he, you know, brilliantly
00:33:30
was able to do all of these things.
00:33:32
And originally we were talking about the median, but then he
00:33:34
said, can I just see the code? And it was easier for him to
00:33:38
translate the code, which is zeros, ones, twos and threes.
00:33:42
There was still some interpretation that had to be
00:33:44
done because technical reasons how entities turn on and off and
00:33:49
how you program them and and the variation between pulses and
00:33:53
possible modulation, which is all technical stuff that we need
00:33:55
to go into. Just going to say these random
00:33:58
words now that is that some audiences may may know what I'm
00:34:03
talking about and others lot. Obviously musicians, sound
00:34:07
artists struggle when it comes to translation because how do
00:34:12
you translate the translation of sound into understandable words
00:34:16
for us non musicians? So there was 2 stages of
00:34:20
translation, you know, literal translations that sort of took
00:34:24
place. But then there's also some
00:34:26
choice in terms of like what frequencies we use for this
00:34:30
piece and why and the sort of relating to the to the frequency
00:34:36
range of the of the singers. You've got a bass, you've got
00:34:39
tenor, Alto and soprano, 2 of each and plus another soprano as
00:34:45
a solo, Juliet and Juliet Fraser.
00:34:49
That is some new arrangements and things, but mostly it's
00:34:53
quite faithful, like the translation is quite faithful to
00:34:56
the original. At this point in the
00:34:58
conversation, I wondered why there were two steps into the
00:35:02
process of translation and to what extent having technology
00:35:06
involved in the sound making, sound noting, and sound editing
00:35:10
didn't affect the relation to the message as it were.
00:35:14
Why not produce the notation from the sound?
00:35:16
This was this was basically how Sam what Sam's approach was.
00:35:20
So I, I mean, I worked with another composer before, Shiva
00:35:26
Fischarecki, who's an incredible young like composer, and she
00:35:31
transcribed one of these electrical signal pieces the way
00:35:34
you're describing. She, you know, she listened to
00:35:36
it, you know, pause, start, pause, start and just literally
00:35:39
notated it. But Sam's process, he found it
00:35:42
easy to do it like this. And it is very precise.
00:35:44
There's some things that are different the, the, just the,
00:35:48
the idiosyncrasies of the code itself where you may hear a
00:35:52
pulse where you may not hear a pulse.
00:35:54
So this is getting a bit technical, but you've basically
00:35:57
got 4 numbers 01/2 and three, right?
00:36:01
Zero is the LED is off 3 the LED is on and one and two are kind
00:36:07
of, you know, dim and a bit brighter, right?
00:36:12
When the LEDs turn on, you hear a click.
00:36:16
When the LED turns off, you hear a click.
00:36:18
So if it's just going on off, you hear click, click, click,
00:36:20
click on off, right? But with the ones and twos,
00:36:24
they're turning on and off at such a high frequency.
00:36:27
And this is this process called pulse width modulation, which is
00:36:31
normally used to dim lighting, Brian, and dim LED lighting.
00:36:35
But when that's happening, then you hear a buzz, you hear a, a
00:36:40
buzzing sound, a tone, and you can do it at any frequency.
00:36:43
So if you do it at 440 Hertz, that's the middle a on a, on a
00:36:47
piano, right? But in the code he's, he can
00:36:54
just see threes. So where he sees threes, he
00:36:57
might put a clap in because that's what the threes turned
00:37:00
into. They turned into claps.
00:37:02
But actually if a three, if you see 003 and then zero again, he
00:37:07
might just put a clap in because he sees us 3 but it's turning on
00:37:10
and off. When we arrive, people are
00:37:13
starting to gather in the side alley of the church.
00:37:16
We take a seat facing 8 music stands in a circle.
00:37:21
I wonder how the Genesis, Adam and Eve and the Old Testament
00:37:26
will feature, and to what extent the voicings will hold their
00:37:31
original version. I wonder if it will be perceived
00:37:35
as an experimental and dry piece of music.
00:37:38
After all, the work exists as the work for those who
00:37:41
experience it, even if the work is often translated as I'm doing
00:37:45
now. Is Ecphresis the fate of any
00:37:49
work of art? Ecresis is a vivid, epic
00:37:53
description of a work in literary form, in words itself
00:37:57
also a translation into what it seeks to detach itself from.
00:38:02
Communication is, after all, relational, reciprocal, ideally
00:38:06
and often simply, a perspective line searching for its vanishing
00:38:10
point. From the crowd, a young man
00:38:14
emerges and starts talking. At first it seems like the whole
00:38:19
crowd is performing, or perhaps that a misguided spectator
00:38:23
decided to cross the invisible threshold between listening and
00:38:27
telling the first utterance spoken.
00:38:31
Looking beyond us is. Open deep speak, can you?
00:38:35
Please recite the book of Genesis, but replace the concept
00:38:38
of. God with nature, the voice of
00:38:40
the open AI chatbot, answers agreeably.
00:38:43
Here is a reimagined version of the Book of Genesis, blending
00:38:46
scientific cosmology with a. We've created God ourselves, you
00:38:50
know, we've, you know, we've gone to that level where it's
00:38:53
like we're just going to answer all our questions and we we're
00:38:55
going to completely give in to this thing.
00:38:58
So it's just an extreme outcome of what we're what I feel like
00:39:02
is happening right now. So in the performance Canaan,
00:39:07
you know whose name is. Why did you choose Canaan?
00:39:10
Particularly. Canaan because I was partly
00:39:12
thinking about the Middle East, the the land that Israel now
00:39:17
occupies Palestine, that region was at one point Canaan's pre
00:39:22
Judaism, you know, or during that time Noah's grandson.
00:39:25
You know, this is a sort of direct reference again, to
00:39:28
create creation myths and the story of Babylon, which is, you
00:39:33
know, which is present day Iran, interestingly enough.
00:39:36
But the character in the in the performance, he's a modern day,
00:39:40
he's the only real person that's here and now.
00:39:44
So in the beginning of the performance, he comes from the
00:39:46
audience and then he comes back to the audience.
00:39:49
And so he's just the everyone else is on a different plane of
00:39:52
reality in a different dimension or a different universe or
00:39:54
something, right? He's talking to DeepSeek.
00:39:58
DeepSeek is clearly an AI, but he never sees.
00:40:00
He never acknowledges the. Application of DeepSeek
00:40:03
DeepSeek, she really wants to be, you know, there's a female
00:40:07
voice and embodies a female and they really want to be human.
00:40:12
DeepSeek really wants to be human, but there's this bit
00:40:16
where, and actually this was Noah, the person who played
00:40:20
DeepSeek said this herself. Maybe when I asked for Kanan,
00:40:24
I'd say Kanan, are you there? You know, because it's this kind
00:40:27
of desperate kind of bid to be be be on the same plane, you
00:40:32
know, And of course he doesn't respond to that.
00:40:35
He's zoned out with these sort of seeds and patterns on the
00:40:37
floor. And at that point, DeepSeek just
00:40:40
leaves. The only real interaction with
00:40:43
one universe and the other universe is DeepSeek hands the
00:40:47
the shaman the ball, the ball and that's kind of an
00:40:50
interaction, but they don't touch each other there has.
00:40:53
Been an insistence on verbal communication as something
00:40:56
fraught, broken, almost. Rosie Brydotti sees it as a
00:41:02
carrier of patriarchal and colonial thinking.
00:41:07
Words. We have the duty of being nomads
00:41:11
as writers and thinkers, she says, not taking words as
00:41:16
gospel. So DeepSeek, I just found it
00:41:19
fascinating as because it came out as a truly open source AI
00:41:27
and the way it kind of wiped out ChatGPT in a kind of a day.
00:41:35
And I just found it sort of ideologically more interesting.
00:41:39
You know, I, I, I played around with, I sort of asked DeepSeek
00:41:42
and ChatGPT the same questions for a while, seeing how they,
00:41:46
how they respond, you know, it's like interviewing the pair of
00:41:49
them. And and I gave the job to
00:41:51
DeepSeek. It was deep.
00:41:53
See seem. To interview a lot better than
00:41:55
ChatGPT. It was as simple as that.
00:41:58
You know, it's I think it might be just a personality thing.
00:42:01
I'm not sure, but it is, it is as simple as that.
00:42:06
And I kind of like, in fact, ChatGPT doesn't respond to these
00:42:11
questions. When I last tried basically deep
00:42:16
sea, when I asked the questions, I was, I was in Japan at the
00:42:19
time, I was on this island called Toy Shimo and I was
00:42:21
preparing this project. And so I was asking these
00:42:23
questions and it was all fine and it was working really well.
00:42:28
I thought I'd ask ChatGPT the same questions to see, but GPT
00:42:32
wouldn't answer. GPT would not recite the book of
00:42:36
Genesis with replacing God with nature, the word nature.
00:42:42
No, it wouldn't do it. I don't know why.
00:42:44
Not that day anyway. It might have changed now, but
00:42:46
that day it just, it kind of refused.
00:42:49
It sort of skirted around. It said things like, well, I can
00:42:52
read the book of Genesis for you.
00:42:53
It's not necessarily to do with religion and God, but to do with
00:42:57
faith, the amount of faith we as a culture are putting into
00:43:04
algorithms, are putting into, you know, artificial
00:43:10
intelligence, you know, So like, if I go outside, I don't drive
00:43:16
anymore. But when I used to drive, I
00:43:18
would just tap in the post code into Google Maps and Google Maps
00:43:22
will tell you where to go and you follow that blue line right
00:43:25
until you get to your, even if that blue line is going a
00:43:28
completely weird direction, you just trust it's going in that
00:43:31
direction because there's traffic in the shortest route,
00:43:33
right? It's not religious faith or a
00:43:35
faith in God. It's like a, yeah.
00:43:37
It's like a extreme trust, like a, it's like a blind trust.
00:43:41
It's like or blind faith, you know, like I, I say faith in the
00:43:46
sense that I have full faith in Google Maps that it will get me
00:43:51
from A to B in the time that it's saying I will get there and
00:43:56
this is the quickest route because there's traffic on the
00:43:59
other route, right? So it's kind of that kind of
00:44:02
faith, right? So and, and so or trust, let's
00:44:06
say it's trust, right? What's the extreme end of that?
00:44:10
It's like, you know, we've, we've created God ourselves, You
00:44:14
know, we've, we've, you know, we've gone to that level where
00:44:17
it's like we're just going to answer all our questions and we,
00:44:19
we're going to completely give in to this thing.
00:44:22
So it's just an extreme outcome of what we're, what I feel like
00:44:26
is happening right now. The singers walk to their music
00:44:31
stands to read a notation with their vocal chords.
00:44:38
The AI returns as a young woman carrying a bowl.
00:44:42
Meanwhile, the young man is on the floor, first pensive, then
00:44:46
squirming, and finally watching a young woman put seeds on the
00:44:50
Platini plate, which is a plate on top of a speaker marking its
00:44:54
vibrations with Nigella's seed. Book of John chapter one verse
00:45:02
one in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God
00:45:07
and the word was God. Book of John chapter one verse
00:45:12
14 The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
00:45:18
Quran chapter 2 verse 31 to 33 God taught Adam all the names of
00:45:26
things. Then he showed them to the
00:45:28
angels and said tell me the names of these if you truly
00:45:31
think you can. They said may you be glorified.
00:45:35
We have knowledge only of what you have taught us.
00:45:39
You have the knowledge to the side.
00:45:42
In the 1st chapter of the Torah called Bereshit or the Genesis,
00:45:46
it is said and God created humankind in the divine image,
00:45:51
creating it in the image of God creating them, male and female.
00:45:58
God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fertile and
00:46:01
increase, fill the earth and master it and rule the fish of
00:46:06
the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that
00:46:10
creep on earth. Yet in the end, the question
00:46:35
remains the same. What does it mean to be human?
00:46:40
The word was made flesh. The AI was made body.
00:46:44
We created God. God was created in our image.
00:46:48
God is the hinge of the relationship, the interface, the
00:46:52
all knowing entity with all the words without flesh.
00:46:56
God created humans to rule over the biosphere, to procreate, to
00:47:01
work and be fertile, and to worship Him and His creation.
00:47:05
When they misbehaved, he inundated the world, sent
00:47:09
plagues to destroy the crops. It is not punishment, but self
00:47:13
fulfilling prophecy. William Burroughs recognized the
00:47:16
sacred power of the written and printed word Mektub.
00:47:20
He liked to quote the Arabic expression Mektub.
00:47:24
It is written, it is fated. Men have written the books,
00:47:29
Males, patriarchs, colonizers. We created AI, and AI is
00:47:36
depleting the water resources and polluting the air.
00:47:39
Quote. Blinded by knowledge, we can
00:47:43
often fail to see what is before our eyes.
00:47:46
We attend to things only so far as it is necessary to
00:47:50
accommodate them within the compartments of thought so that
00:47:53
they can be ticked off, accounted for, understood, laid
00:47:57
to rest. But truly to attend is to bring
00:48:01
things to presence, not to discover the truth about them,
00:48:05
but to discover the truth that comes from them in the
00:48:08
experience. This is the truth of wisdom.
00:48:12
It lies not in objective fact or in what scientists treat U.S.
00:48:17
data, nor will we come any closer to it by gathering more
00:48:21
information. For the truth of wisdom lies
00:48:24
beyond the facts. And this was Tim Ingold in a
00:48:29
text brought to my attention by Harun Merza through Yates Norton
00:48:35
and Ines Kosta. It is called On not knowing and
00:48:39
paying attention how to walk in a possible world, and funnily
00:48:44
enough, you can find it on the Internet.
00:48:50
When I go back to see the exhibition, I stand in the room
00:48:54
absorbed. Something touches my neck.
00:48:58
It's the first sound of Adam Eve other than a UFO for Coral
00:49:01
Octet. Just the clicks, the buzzes
00:49:05
turned into notes and claps. They fill the room.
00:49:10
I move around and each time I move I hear it differently.
00:49:17
OK, so this was art travelogue, a journey to South Bend on sea
00:49:22
to Clifton Center to Focal Point Gallery to experience Haroon
00:49:27
Maz's new Commission. It's there for you.
00:49:29
It plays every 15 minutes as a sound piece at Focal Point
00:49:34
Gallery. Thank you so much to Yates and
00:49:38
Inish for all the chats for the ideas.
00:49:42
A special thanks to Emma Jeffries at Focal Point Gallery
00:49:46
also for the documentation sent because as you know,
00:49:50
Exhibitionist is an audio experience, but it can also be a
00:49:53
visual one if you hop off to YouTube or at Spotify.
00:49:58
A very special thanks to Harun Maza for his patience, for his
00:50:02
generosity and his trust. Final mention to the whole team
00:50:08
that Haroon Maza gathered, I highly recommend Googling
00:50:14
Radical Ethics, which is the project that Inesh Kosta
00:50:19
referred to in the beginning of the episode, where you can learn
00:50:22
a lot about the innovative and quite radical and pioneering
00:50:27
projects that took place in the county, the most misunderstood
00:50:32
county of the UKI will put all the other references of the
00:50:37
episode, and there are quite a few in the newsletter, so sign
00:50:41
up. You will always have more
00:50:43
detailed references than in the show's notes.
00:50:46
And in the show's notes, I will give you a few pointers to what
00:50:50
has been mentioned in the episode, of course, because
00:50:53
there's really exciting stuff in there.
00:50:55
But sign up for the newsletter, follow us on Instagram.
00:50:58
Tell us what you think about this new format and until the
00:51:02
next one, take care, visit exhibitions, be present and stay
00:51:07
Exhibition Mr. Until next time, bye bye.