iː ɡoʊ weɪ

https://aimc2023.pubpub.org/pub/hpy32yre

This semi-improvised performance explores abstract voice sounds, in the tradition of dadaist phonetic poetry, following the trajectory of a performer whose voice and verbality is slowly escaping him. The performance begins from the text of possibly the most well-known dadaist sound poem, Kurt Schwitters' 'Die Sonata in Urlauten' (Ursonate), and expands upon this text with additional speech-sounds and fragments of language collaged in collaboration with a GPT-family text prediction model. As the performance progresses the performer’s voice is made increasingly distant from his own biological voice, augmented and transformed by real-time voice 'style transfer' models. The performer begins performing through a clone of his own voice that soon assimilates fragments of the voice of Jaap Blonk, one of the most celebrated living sound poets and performers of Ursonate (Blonk 2009). The performer's augmented voice moves onward, dissolving and coalescing into multi-human, polyphonic and choral forms and the ‘voices’ of non-human mammal and bird species.