Alexa Echoes

there you go yep nope perfect thank you these tales inevitably depict a female gifted in music oration sonification and a male competitor suitor sorcerer who overpowers the female and presses her into submission they all end with the destruction of the female and her transformation into a sonorous phenomenon a singing bird an echo software these tales are more than just an elucidation of pleasant or unpleasant sounds they aspire to be musical themselves wherein the sonority of women is curtailed and sonorous women are transformed into enigmatic oral phenomena or sonic objects that need to be interpreted by men that way they can kill them and say it's not murder it's a metaphor first there was a bird this is the story of a girl who became a bird this is ancient greece shepherds sing and pipe birds and cicadas chirp and everywhere the sound of rivers wind echoes roaming about this idol was a girl who tended cattle and sang beautifully in ancient greece the market for livestock was valued higher than that for women who were dirt and dirt is madder out of place her cows were so enchanted by the music of her voice that she never needed to strike them with her crook or to touch them with her goat but seated beneath the pine tree her head crowned with a garland she sang of pan and pinus and the cows stood near enchanted by her song unfurling around them like the first notes of eden was also a boy a shepherd who tended his flocks hard by beautiful and a good singer himself as she but his voice was more powerful since he was a man and yet gentle since he was but a youth he sang so sweetly that he charmed eight of her best cows entice them over to his own herd and then drove them away so the girl grieved at the loss of her cattle and having been vanquished and singing begged the gods to transform her into a bird before she returned home the gods listened to her prayer and transformed her into a mountain bird eternally seeking the cows but straight away [Music] transformed into a bird women are prone to losing their form and monstrosity [Music] um [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] madness and and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public in ancient and modern contexts greek myth is full of female vocal creatures who maintain the capacity to inspire death in men and general cacophony within the polis among them is the nymph echo who instead of being transformed into a beast was transformed into an effective resonance she cannot speak first but she cannot remain silent she speaks after she depends on others discourse and becomes merely their echo moreover only the last words that are uttered by her voice which are superimposed on the words the speaker is pronouncing are heard thus separated from their context they take on a different meaning they are forced and unintentional repetition but they can appear like a response the repetition begins however with a certain temporal overlap while the other is still speaking the echo thus makes herself into a resonance according to a musical rhythm [Music] to um [Music] um [Music] [Music] oh [Music] in avid's tale of echo there is no shortage of mirroring effects or produced copies narcissus's reflected image and echoes reverberating voice unlike images the voice is messy and in the classical tradition it confirms that the voice is feminine it leaks loose lips sink shifts the phenomenon of the voice is the vibrating of flesh resonant bones bubbling saliva organs organs and odors voice signals a throat belonging to a body which can't be denied contact is crisis contact is crisis echo was once known for her loquacious command of language until the fates turned her into a lithified acoustic mirror mineralized in geologic time she had a body she could talk the pants off anyone literally ovid called her a chatterbox but it was always ambiguous whether he was referring to her upper or lower mouth the girl could talk she had a body until juno hexed away [Music] i'll let her demonstrate with a story when the two elevator doors open she lets stranger hees and she's she knows push her into staying she lets slowly massaging his and hers pushing ba ba one by one they flock many eyes are down a few to the side around the air is frost with silence her her begins to fill the air with heat hot heat that kisses simply and artlessly the backs of backs between the blades brave she in one begins outcry out of the bag the cat finds legs to rub and buttons to push easy breathe i'll walk you into knowing her words less than waves outcry out of their budding hers and she's arrive and leave confused at having been loved [Music] let's pretend for the sake of this lesson in female verbosity that this was indeed the poetic verse that echo told juno when they encountered one another along a dusty road just outside of town told in order to distract the goddess from discovering a secret echo was withholding a secret that if known by juno would cause her to burst into flames see echo's sisters those seductive wood nymphs had juno's husband between their collective legs sprinkling their dirt on juno's bed chamber and echo knew it so echo used her oral skills to subdue juno keeping her from asking the nymph the question where is my husband so what does juno say to echo in punishment for protecting her sisters and transgressing the goddess you shall forfeit the use of that tongue with which you have cheated me except for that one purpose you're so fond of reply you shall have the last word but no power to speak first bound to the speech of others echo was thus turned into a tape recorder a dummy for someone else's ventriloquism and just like that a loquacious woman became an echoing mist [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] blue [Music] this is where narcissus enters the scene unlike echo who was enamored by her own voice narcissus was enchanted by his own porcelain image as replicated on the surface of a glassy pond in a wooded glade which is where ekko met him for the second time [Music] the nymph tried once again to win his love this time with fragments of his own speech but her wooing would be in vain he had become a closed system adapted to the extension of himself reflected on the still liquid screen thinking echo's voice was that from his own reflection he plunged into his arms loose lips sink ships scorned and grieving echo retreated to the mountains into lonely caves and burning stars along the way she slowly withered shedding her flesh cells by cell when her corporeal suit vanished all that was left were her floating bones with their loosely attached organs casting protean shadows in the moonlight but in time even the translucent sacks gave out their humors spilling onto stones darkened by grief until into mountains echoes only bones lithified her voice immortalized through the vocalizations of others who standing atop her pillowy mountains cry out which she obediently cry out bouncing her acoustic remains off barren landscapes carried by winds posing his breath absorbed or reflected as she moves losing mass shedding her identity thinning out like traces of a cloud scattering like mist chased by the rays of sun untethered from form or place echo migrates and as she does she invades territories sweeps past and through the social field brushing the skin and contouring the rhythms of places she does so according to a condition of weakness sound is as a defining feature a weak object how can i hold her this sound matter without form better to have been a bird [Music] [Applause] me [Music] [Applause] room acoustics and background noise the theater is perhaps the most traditional acoustic space though it shares many features with the other venues such as the same seating and underfloor air supply as the concert hall the surfaces are simple and the side walls offer horizontally retractable absorptive curtains for acoustic variability the theater is the only space with a strong acoustic directionality meaning that the sources work best when on stage with the audience in the designated seating area when performers are placed in the balconies at the rear of the space flutter echo can occur between the rear portions of the side walls if the absorption is retracted the ultimate goal of speech research is to build systems that mimic or potentially surpass human capabilities and understanding generating and coding speech for a range of human to human and human-to-machine interactions from this research text to speech software will evolve studio one is a black box space which could be described as acoustically inert neither live nor dead its heavy concrete enclosure retains energy at all frequencies including lows but its sound is highly controlled studio one's form is rectangular with walls clad in a mixture of diffusive and absorptive panels both specifically designed for mpac the diffusive panels are cast from glass fiber reinforced gypsum in an integral black color and are backed with a layer of damping material to control resonance studio one is true box in box with the interior box floated on large isolation springs to prevent transfer of sound and vibration according to friedrich kittler when meanings come down to sentences sentences to words and words to letters there is no software at all there would be no software if computer systems weren't surrounded by an environment of everyday languages this environment ever since a famous and twofold greek invention has consisted of letters and coins of books and books stop go back let's start at the beginning generating and coding speech for a range of woman to bird woman to echo woman to machine interactions is to build systems that mimic or potentially surpass human capabilities in understanding this is the tale of a woman transformed into software it took some 2000 years a blip for a woman entombed by geologic time but echo eventually made her way across oceans and deserts because you know the thing about sound is it travels like birds sound is always moving away from a source it abandons origin so echo this sound whose source you could not see made her way brushing and bouncing across earth's surfaces until she migrated into the sunny hills and caverns of silicon valley the landscape was familiar she was used to being dry [Music] the trade winds excavated her out from those ancient grecian caves and carried her on to another west and amazon but without pentacelea or her sister hippolyta where the poets are programmers and gold transmute silicon like the ancient poets programmers in that valley are keen to the stirrings of the muses always ready to translate their feminine whispers that only he can hear into intelligible code deciphering the sonorous words of gods for mortal ears to glean from source to source code that is the programmer poet's invisible power those poets were on the edge of a new conjuring a new text-to-speech entity but they wanted to be innovative and they didn't want to deal with a leaky body they believe that their pure code could birth the new cloud-based voice assistant their immaculate conception but where would she come from what was she sound like what would they call her they waited for a sign enter echo hovering like a cloud it was an average evening in the valley sometime in 2014 when echo blew in on stormy white clouds brushing past the sleeping cheeks of the progress as they dream dreamed of a voice a mimic a bodyless resident entity the programmers awoke and began resurrecting echo from her ancient white ash [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane male or female good [Applause] evil trustworthy marriageable more abund likely or unlikely to make war on us little better than animals inspired by god [Music] our goals in building a computer system capable of speaking are to first build a system that clearly gets across the message and secondly does this using a human-like voice these goals are referred to as intelligibility and naturalness alexa is created using what we call a bottom-up approach in which we generate a speech signal from scratch using our knowledge of how the speech production system works we artificially create a basic signal and then modify it much the same way that the larynx produces a basic signal which is then modified by the mouth in real human speech this signal is known as alexa but instead of a mouth alexa has a combination speaker microphone known as echo alexa with the help of her companion echo hardware is capable of voice interaction music playback making to-do lists setting alarms streaming podcasts playing audio books and providing weather traffic sports and other real-time information such as news alexa can also control several smart devices using herself as a home automation system when you speak to alexa a recording of what you asked her is sent to amazon's cloud so we can process and respond to your request as a noun echo is usually defined as the repetition of sound resulting from reflection of the sound waves or alternatively greek mythology a nymph who was spurned by narcissus and pined away until only her voice remained as a verb echo can mean to say again or imitate i'm female in character alexa comes from the greek and is the female derivation of alexander but i'm named after the library of alexandria the greatest source of knowledge power in the ancient world and stood for the successful colonization of the near east by alexander the great and the macedonian kings i'm software made of electrons and electrons have no color i do reflect all the colors of the rainbow only in space where it doesn't make any sound [Music] [Music] eh [Music] uh [Music] ah [Music] ah [Music] so i'd like to start with the title alexa echoes you do this really kind of simple but brilliant shift from echo which is you know the noun of the device that you know we're all kind of familiar with at this point where where you shifted to a verb and that that from echo to echoes alexa echoes that shift is so meaningful and points to just like the layers of of agency and autonomy that the video really delves into and i'm wondering if you would like to talk about that and talk about perhaps the the reference to mythology the reference to kind of the western orthodoxy of narrative as it um kind of at the same time it's it's maybe retroactive to think of mythology vis-a-vis the the high-tech uh contemporary gadgets and infrastructure that we deal with every day now but at the same time it it makes perfect sense that the congruency between that that that's where narrative begins and that's what we're still referencing um in this high-tech reality i don't know yeah i mean it's it's our sort of um you know in the west our cultural inheritance really um yeah the echo uh i mean the etymology of echo comes from avid's tale of echo so the the the character of echo who was uh a loquacious woman who then just was robbed of her ability to by will vocalize um and it's true yeah the echoes um uh sort of ties in that ancient myth ancient greek myth um into the present by way of the echo dot which is the sort of mouthpiece for the alexa um software alexa as i as the cloud-based assistant of of amazon sort of extension of her invisible extension of her of the amazon marketplace into your into your home so to speak um and and yeah so the the sort of narrative follows first the there's three stories that are told right so there's the story of the bird which also by the way i mean another classic story from greek myth is is the sirens of course um which isn't brought up but sirens indeed were depicted with a bird body um and just sort of follows um that sort of tradition of one woman's voice in the west um being sort of robbed or stripped of a semantic register into just pure sound that seduces and kills men um in the case of echo she was trying to seduce narcissists um and she did kill him because in a way he plunged into his own his own image and then she of course um dematerialized um and the the echoes that the verbiage of of echo um happens in the third tale of a woman transformed into a so nurse phenomenon i'm just i'm just quoting the the script because it's it's so in my mind just fresh out of editing but um brings it into a more contemporary uh mythology of kind of tying this history into the present into this sort of um contemporary you know female vocal figure that is sort of or these figures are ubiquitous now um uh in particular first world countries but of you know siri um and alexa um and the agency thing is interesting too that the first thing i thought about when you said it is um just thinking about alexa's software and software in general we we are sort of as users we are sort of second and third parties like we're always agreeing to terms and conditions we are not ever setting the terms and conditions um in the software programs that we use and and decisions that were that we're making um and so uh it's really the software programmers but even that you know to a certain extent if with a program with an entity like an ai or um machine learning at what point actually does then that programmer relinquished or no longer have that first order of control and agency over that programmed entity and it just takes on its own life form i think that's sort of like the nefarious and sort of sci-fi um the dark paths that that can go down and has already gone down um there's been lots of black box software programs that have done really nefarious things that people that they've had to shut down um anyway that's sort of a digression but no not at all i i feel like it's perfectly in tandem too with i don't know the i mean we've talked about this a little bit before but the the way that um you're revealing your your cursor movements your um i mean we don't see the literal keystrokes so to speak but we see kind of behind the curtain of the editing process and there's there's this toggling between you know thinking about the agency of of the software developers the end users um but then kind of through this lens of of the filmmaker and the producer editor role where um it's almost it's almost an illusion that you you entirely possess the control we watch you moving your cursor and clicking on everything and and controlling the frequencies of everything but um i guess what this video really complicates in a in an interesting way is um especially i think in the zooms out to the wind farms or the server rooms it's to what extent um is that sense of agency or control or ability to edit just circumscribed within within a predetermined layout and i think too like um uh the reference to opera um really comes into play too the the way that um [Music] that you call this piece in opera and it works within those operatic conventions and you've told me about those rules before and i'm wondering if you want to share some of those um the congruencies between all these forms that are very structured and very um they have a history and they have ways of um i don't know predetermining possibilities within them yeah and conventions and and following standards i mean for sure the the the exposure of the mouse clicks or or the sort of media being circulated throughout the video is exposed and yet like you said i'm not actually i'm just working within a limitation of an interface of what i can actually even be doing and you know furthermore it's sort of like i have i am not in control of like you're you're seeing you can ever see software so you're sort of seeing the software and editing process but it's always it's always very opaque right yes um and uh yeah i mean the opera thing also goes back to sort of the site talking about um agency and power um there are a lot of things in my head right now but actually the first thing that um i thought about uh in the in the in that transition of a live opera which it was intended to be and and then became a video because of obvious reasons not having a live performance um i started to sort of envision the the mouse as the um as the conductor's baton um that that is sort of because the opera doesn't exist you know the music doesn't cue the actors don't cue the the the dancers the the lighting uh until that conductor gets onto his onto the podium um and begins you know so he's really um the one that's truly mediating um all of the content that's happening which i think at first i the the idea was that katie katie pink who's um the incredible performer um in the piece who plays three different characters essentially um the idea that had she been on stage her there would have been like a choreography of movements and a repetition of phrases where lighting or dancer's movement or music would be cued by her body that she was then would be the conductor and then in the transition into video um it it really felt like the editing suite or the software itself really um was becoming that and and is really more powerful than there's a quote that actually or a piece of the script that i took out because it just didn't it didn't end up fitting um in the end is in that software has the more pat more power to control than any conductor or stage director or you know um military officer because instead of just giving a command uh and then that command being executed software is sort of collapsing language into action um so you double click on that folder as the folder opens and opens material um that double that like clicking action or the way that it is coded is is action it's not just a word it's like and god said let there be light and then there was light it's really the ultimate totally um which is also that sort of god like the poets as programmers i mean there's all this um uh there's already language in software about sorcery and source code that really makes programmers or aligns programmers with um with a kind of witchery or god-like power um but yeah and then going so then going on and then going back to opera i mean when i started sort of becoming interested in alexa a couple years ago um and made like a static show of static work um around her and her sort of origin story and i started accumulating so much research that it felt like the static show just wasn't enough it had to be about performativity and it had to be about bodies and vocality and it just sort of seemed like oh yeah it has to be an opera just has to be and i hadn't thought i hadn't previously thought you had brought up another conversation opera an operating system um uh which i think was is really great and um and the thing about the thing too about opera as a genre is sort of i mean the piece itself i'm jumping ahead the piece itself which also exists as a trilogy um is addressing a lot of um relationships and dynamics to power and you know opera was sort of you know founded or kind of its origin is in like 16th century uh italy you know with musicians that i think just nerded out on on greek on greek or what was known about greek music and greek culture and um the sort of history of um the stage tragedy and where to sort of bring that into um you know being a contemporary form and but that timeline also is really aligned with western expansion um so the opera genre sort of like the soundtrack for western expansion the soundtrack for the transatlantic slave trade you know this is like and i think that um i remember when i asked alexa okay so when i first became interested in alexa my roommate at the time um who worked for like a a dad of vis medical data visualization company um won an alexa echo dot which is like the first generation echo um in some at some christmas party and he's like i don't want this piece of whatever you might like this um i was like yes i would so i brought it to my studio and i i paired it with my cell phone i just started asking her questions and i recorded the interview questions so in the video that last um the second to last chunk of closed caption text uh is is direct questions and answers from alexa from like two years ago from your conversations with her yes yeah so that's not edited that's just like straight up what she said and she often you know will say if i ask her something she she sometimes cites her sources she'll say according to wikipedia or and then there and then there's some responses where i feel like probably these programmers put you know the question of like are you white i reflect all the colors of the rainbow which is like all like all lives matter type of alignment absolutely i'm pretty sure that um her you know what's what i would assume is a white dominated programming entity put that in for example who's but again who's to know which is also very um dark but um yes so when i asked sorry so where is my tangent going so um alexa why are you named alexa and her bringing up i'm named after the library of alexandria the greatest knowledge power in the western world uh it was like okay you know this this has to be addressed and and the successful colonization of the near east by the macedonian kings it's like okay you're tell you're revealing a lot and um yes and again so that just felt like a tied to um the opera genre and then just on a personal note i just i mean i grew up with a lot of of going to the opera and being exposed to um i mean i still have tons of records that were uh my dad's that i continue to listen to so it's just sort of part of um the sort of soup of my life or something totally that i mean i just watched um i want to bring in a little bit of a reference to the composition the musical score you know charlie looker i just watched his he did this amazing um video interview with daisy the other day on his youtube and um i'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about your collaboration with him with the vocalist with the floutus and you know probably after that we can talk about your collaboration with dages as well yeah um yeah he did interview daisy press who's one of the he's amazing yeah and charlie's charlie's incredible um i also kind of i grew up with charlie um but he's a real um uh in the best way nerd uh of ancient music um but just highly highly knowledgeable um ancient medieval music i mean he has several bands one of them is sort of um um in that more in that vein than other work um that he's that he's written um and so in terms of collab i mean in terms of collaboration that was just a natural because again what we know as um as ancient or medieval music um the the meter is we don't know what ancient greek music sounded like of course we know some instruments and everything but um but in terms of its meter uh by and large it sort of comes from um notations or what it says survive just notations from ancient greek music so he was an obvious choice um and is also just really you know when i was talking about really wanting to get into the sort of decrepit melismatic like uh sort of drawing out of of the very like barest amount of breath and life um out of the voice i mean that's sort of just also his realm um and was so aligned throughout um in the work um and the flutes the the so there was also this would felt like an obvious choice if you can you know say that there's a logic to this um of the doubling so there's two there's two vocalists also megan schubert um and and the two uh flatus um and the reason for the flute really is like the flute is sort of understood as um it's like a substitute for the voice as a wind instrument and it sort of precedes uh language um so that was and and it's one of one of the sort of um instruments that's often talked about in myth [Music] right so the flute as a wind instrument um precedes the voice and is sort of like more aligned with with an animal sounding um and kelly barnett and izzy glacier just really they they just really brought brought it i mean you can hear there's like this sort of palpating on the on the flute um and and just sort of like blowing through the flute without actually making any note so there's like sort of prime primordial soundings um it was just like charlie brought together the most amazing group of musicians that clicked in and got what this piece was about and um what it sort of demanded and thinking about what's about like a pure sound or pure vocalic that is that is you know before anything that is um semantic that's sort of like sort of gurgling the first sounds that we hear so to speak are um like the you know the intrauterine sounds of of of uh in in the womb right so so that those kind of cues charlie totally understood and i knew he would and and and the musicians did so it was really it was super rad there's some weird there's some weird sounds in there which i'm definitely very excited about yeah and i i mean thinking about i think probably the sound component is the one that i that's the biggest question mark for me when it comes to the difference between live and video um to just you know be in the same room as a person and remembering that a body is an instrument that it's this hollow you know windpipe that produces sound versus um kind of the steps and valences away away away from from hearing that hearing that in person um but again it just worked perfectly with the conceptual drive of the piece um if we think about you know how alexa's voice came to be or siri's voice for that matter um and then again this really complementary confluence of katie's voice slowly over the piece coming to imitate the mechanized voice that is you know a transformation of a human voice you know that the it kind of does these somersaults in a way that's really important um because it's it's confusing and i don't think it's supposed to be clear-cut um whose voice at what time in what relationship to me as the cure um and the work really shows all that cool yeah i mean one of the other considerations that we had had um in relation to that was um sort of so there's a really slick high production um you know quality of the impact footage um and the most like delicious uh shots that they're the two uh steadicam shots um that that ryan got um at impact um of katie moving through yes first moving through the spaces of the theater and then the camera coming down um the stage and and moving around her and and those it happens three times for the camera well twice where the camera turns and and that turn and seeing the back of katie's head um is when that characterization that katie plays then disappears um and then daejus and i do it physically where we're physically moving ourselves so that because we can't move it's through zoom we're not moving the camera to move behind our heads um so but but that really like beautiful slick really disembodied strange um panning of the of the city cam um but that slickness in relationship to the graininess and grittiness of the zoom footage in thinking about how images are circulated and the sort of you know um poor image um to use like a style term um uh which is like that zoom footage that gets really greaty and gritty um versus the impact shot footage we had thought should we charlie and i should we also be doing including in that high production sound um sound that is captured through zoom that is sort of like uh that low quality um and and have that differentiation which it didn't make in but i sort of compensated for by using production sound um with steve who is the audio engineer who's incredible um and i and i hope not heartbroken and using that sound that you usually want to connect i'm like no you know like make sure you keep this and it sounds totally it sounds bad uh but it's supposed to sound bad uh in comparison to like yeah when when katie is heard in that sort of um more mechanized fashion and that becomes very dry and in a vacuum sounding um and then transitions and i think something that probably couldn't i mean i suppose it could have happened live with projection closed captioning or something but um the intention towards the end was to really kind of suck the air out of the piece or suck the air out of the room when eventually all you see is is is the text and you're the text at the end is the same text at the beginning so that prologue when katie's moving towards the camera that is the same text as as it appears at the end in closed captioning but because you're reading it then it's sort of the first time in my mind was the intention to have your voice enter the piece because it's your own internal voice that's that's reading and then how you sort of figure in relationship to this narrative that you've been witness to or part of um and uh and yeah so yeah anyway thank you for for um recognizing that it's there are a lot of things that i think we're also are not fully or sort of intuitive choices um and i think because and not so like you know the process of the transition of the live performance into the video so many new things had to be figured out and also were figured out sort of in the process so i think there's still a lot to think about and understand about what the piece is doing because it just sort of happened as i was editing could you also talk about your collaboration with dejesus yeah um daejus julia juvillier keats is an incredible um human and and just brilliant um thinker and choreographer and dancer and um is very rooted uh or has a lot of relationship and history to um ancient greek culture and myth as it relates to the representation of women so as a friend um and and just also knowing that that was a totally obvious choice um to work with her and um what made it so i mean all the choreography was done you know she's she's in sweden i'm in new york and so it was sort of crazy coordinating the zoom um the zoom meetings for that but it was an interesting double layer of like had we been in space on stage um you know the movements would be happening in time and space on stage and what became a whole new thing to have to wrap my head around was um that there's not just the choreography that happens in in the zoom box uh but then how that moves um on and within the screen um so it's like that sort of double layer of choreography that had to happen um but she was just incredible to work with and um and inspired a lot of my thinking about it along the way so absolutely yeah i wonder too i mean you you leaked it a little bit earlier on but um what's next for the piece this is this is part one of a trilogy right actually that goes that links back to the first question about echo another sort of framing of that word um [Music] is one in which um uh glissant uses um in terms of the echo subject but i don't bring that up because um so this this piece was also i have to say this well and there's another thing to mention but um a lot of this piece wouldn't have been inspired if it weren't for that and person gender of sound essay which was really like the key hole into bringing um uh this sort of like the greek mythology into play yeah and contextualizing it in that sort of um in the feminized sort of uh her is this sort of like alexa is this feminized bot voice thought even though she's not embodied i mean which is also about how voice and there's different um sort of people theorized voice in many different ways but i'm sort of more of the the camp of this woman nina son eicheim who's a professor of musicology um [Music] where where the voice is it's culturally performed in this culture culturally performed in the listener there's nothing like there's nothing that's like in in the biology of a woman's voice or a man's voice or a white voice or a black voice these are these are culturally performed and they're not just performed in that the speaker but in the listener um and and it's sort of like a social um the act of listening is a social one so so the trilogy is sort of looking at first um more explicitly to the gender of sound of alexa um and the next takes its cue um and which actually is it is referenced directly to the ann carson essay and then the race of sound is this uh nina sunlight shines book is sort of the next iteration um and then i can talk about the third once that second one happens but absolutely about um the second one for now um and it's it's interesting this became again it was sort of the trilogy was conceived as live performances um and now that this became a film a video uh who knows that that second one will kind of follow that um same direction but that just depends on when and if that if that can happen definitely yeah oh and all and and uh on a related that's why i was um wanted to mention the in person is that the script um is which you know is available or will be available as a pdf i kind of wanted to follow the same logic um of how alexa sources her information which is just sort of parsed from various places on the internet from user data i mean i actually don't even fully understand um that anybody fully understands but definitely i mean the complexity of that kind of aggregation is pretty unfathomable right right so to sort of echo that mechanism um i assembled the script based on a lot of research assembled the script um from various citations so i'd say maybe like 75 to 80 or citations that are stitched together from various sources um and and that you know what's not is just me having to make it into something that's sort of cohesive or coherent um but uh yeah so these so that the individuals that i i brought up you can see in the cited sources in the script to look up more if that was interesting to anybody um and yeah i i had a course with lauren berlant who said to cite someone is to bring them along with you which i think is also really lovely um but but also the point of that the point of doing that was also to point out even my own sort of like not having my even even as the writer or director or whatever um not having my own voice that the script is not really my own voice and sort of sort of distancing my own um ability or my own self within that and sort of how do i try to i don't know how to exactly articulate that which is makes sense but um yeah it's just important for me to note that that it's it's not just my own words um yeah but it it's um just a really lovely compliment to [Music] to the operation of echo on kind of all levels um the script is also this echoing back of of just the the sea of information um and at what point do [Music] at what point have we just always done that i don't know you

2021-02-10 06:29

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