A More Than Human Tongue
A More Than Human Tongue
A Two-Person Residency with Lauren Lee McCarthy
Music Center LA, August 29 – November 3, 2024
Presented by the Music Center Digital Innovation Initiative
Featuring Voice in My Head by Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald
And Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup) (With Atlas Acopian and Lara Sarkissian)
This two-person residency was hosted by the Music Center’s Digital Innovation Initiative and featured two installations that explored the theme of communication with and through more-than-human agents: One Who Looks at the Cup and Voice in My Head, by Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald.
About Voice in My Head: “Voice In My Head explores the implications for AI (ChatGPT) to listen and intervene in your social experience in real-time, augmenting your personality. The piece begins with an onboarding session where you place a bud in your ear and the voice asks you to reflect on the inner voice you were born with. What if it could be more caring? Less obsessive? Less judgmental? More helpful? What if you could change your inner monologue? As you respond to the onboarding questions, it clones the sound of your voice and uses it to speak to you. Then you go out into the world, as the voice follows along and offers commentary and direction. The resulting performance calls into question how natural vs synthetic each person’s thoughts actually are. Do any of us have our own point of view?”
About Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup): Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup) is a collaboration that uses community dataset creation to train a model to perform coffee reading and to output predictions in both Armenian and English. Coffee reading divines a querent’s past, present, and future by decoding the visual patterns at the bottom of their cup. This method of divination originates in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), where it has circulated as a predictive technology since as early as the 16th century. Across SWANA diasporas, coffee reading has been matrilineally transmitted as a ritual of affirming futurity.
The project’s bilingual training corpus features transcripts and images from coffee readings conducted by the artist with SWANA diasporans in Los Angeles; oral histories gathered on the subject of liberatory futures; and text from turn-of-the- century Armenian feminist writer, Shushanik Kurghinian. Its bilingual, community-generated training data and outputs aim to counter what I call algolinguicism: processes that minoritize speakers of non-dominant languages and obstruct their access to the authorship of digital technologies. In these ways, One Who Looks at the Cup turns to intuitive, embodied, and ancestral forms of collective future-making to unsettle the technoscientific logics of algorithmic prediction.
The development of One Who Looks at the Cup was supported by the Music Center Digital Innovation Initiative.
Project Credits:
Exhibition Design: Lauren Lee McCarthy
Film: Dir. Atlas Acopian, Score Lara Sarkissian
Cups: Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian
Creative Technologists: Hua Chai and Danny Snelson
Translation: Margo Gevorgyan and Hayk Makhmuryan
