Performance View: Ghost in the Cog
by Kenneth Constance Loe and Moritz Nahold (Subletvis)Part of the symposium In Terms of Media… and the exhibition Data Doom Desire, presented by The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
Are there ways to extend the algorithm and redefine machine relationships while producing new sound-text patterns? In their joint web residency at Schloss Solitude project Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score, sound artist and composer Moritz Nahold and artist, writer, and performer Kenneth Constance Loe experimented with analogue and digital feedback loops, algorithms, and intermedial/intertextual translation modes. While reworking/generating new sound and poetry, Nahold and Loe are particularly interested in the ‘slippages and inflections of meaning and on medium-specificity in human-AI translation.’
Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score was the proposed project of sound artist and composer Moritz Nahold and artist, writer, and performer Kenneth Constance Loe for the ‘Algorithmic Poetry’ web residency at Schloss Solitude. The project explores ideas and processes that Nahold and Loe embarked on in an earlier collaboration in January 2023 at Hothouse in Singapore, specifically how poetic language written with sound in mind would translate materially, and vice versa.
‘We are particularly interested in the slippages and inflections of meaning and on medium-specificity in human-AI translation. Fashioning ourselves as algorithms and working together with AI (text-to-music, chatbots, and so forth), we will approach the residency as a feedback loop: cross-feed our sound works and poetry into different machine-learning models as a means to analyze their sound patterns and intertextual qualities; hand the material over to each other (Subletvis–text, Kenneth–sound); use those insights to rework/generate new material; feed them back into the various models; repeat.’
The goal of Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score is to create a non-exhaustive database of sound and poetic text: words and phrases directly linked/tagged to audio samples, music clips, and soundbites. The final output of the residency will be a poetic score (a long poem where each word triggers a sound sample, crafted from this database). The reader-player will be able to create their own compositions/soundscapes via agentive emotional resonances vis-à-vis word associations.
