WHERE THE LOST LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD BEGINS
RESPONSIVE, AUDIO-VISUAL INSTALLATION WITH SYNCHRONISED LIGHT,
8-CHANNEL SOUND, PROJECTION-MAPPED VIDEO AND DOT-MATRIX PRINT-OUTS
ELYSIUM GALLERY, SEPTEMBER 2025
Where the Lost Language of the Dead Begins considered our changing relationship with technology, from the arrival of the home computer to recent developments in artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
At the centre of the installation, a sculptural form based loosely on the physical architecture of a quantum computer supported ten radiating arms of synchronised light. Its structure also referencing Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller: ten stories which repeatedly began, only to be interrupted and replaced by another possible narrative.
Visitors became part of this system. As each one entered the work, a camera attempted to ‘read’ them, translating their image into a text prompt. This was subsequently 'rewritten' using the tone and poetic voice of Calvino, with approximately ten percent of the text translated into Welsh. The resulting account was spoken aloud in the space using text-to-speech before being sent, via the open-source CUPS printing system, to a 1980s dot-matrix printer.
The response from visitors became an important part of the work. Some deliberately posed for the camera, while others appeared suspicious of it, testing or avoiding its gaze. Having heard themselves interpreted by the computer, many moved directly to the printer to discover how they had been rendered within the system.
The process created a discrepancy between self-image, machine vision and literary interpretation. Objects, clothing, gestures and apparent expressions were reshaped through language, translation and the borrowed voice of another author. What emerged was not simply a description of the visitor, but a parallel version of them. Each encounter simulating an additional chapter to Calvino’s ten: provisional, unstable and partial, produced through a combination of visitor and machine to construct new narratives.
Two moving-image works extended these ideas. One used Craig Reynolds’ Boids algorithm, in which individually simple agents collectively formed complex flocking behaviour. Originally conceived as a model of animal movement, in this version, the system became a reflection on human behaviour: individuals responding to one another, clustering, separating and moving according to a set of invisible rules.
A second sequence presented ten significant moments in technological development since the invention of the home computer. Passages from Calvino’s novel were inserted directly into the source code of the video files, disrupting the images at source. The resulting footage remained partly legible but became unstable, fragmented and unpredictable; historical records physically altered by the literary concept structuring the wider installation.
The soundscape operated in a similarly contingent way. Data retrieved remotely from a quantum computer was translated into MIDI notes and introduced into an existing 8-channel composition. Each event created a new moment of harmony or discord, its musical effect unknown until it occurred. The lighting responded in synchronisation, extending these shifts across the physical space, creating an environment in which past, present and possible futures overlapped.
Across the installation, AI, computer vision and quantum computing sat alongside serial connections, continuous-feed paper and a dot-matrix printer. Technologies which once appeared transformative have now become obsolete, while newer systems have arrived accompanied by their own mixture of possibility, uncertainty and unease.
Over the course of the exhibition, the participant-reading system also began to repeat itself, returning to particular phrases and ways of describing people. Rather than correcting this apparent failure, the repetition was retained as part of the work, exposing the limits of a system attempting to reproduce the creativity in human voice while remaining constrained by its own structures.
At the end of the exhibition, the digital images and generated data were erased. What remains is now a physical paper archive of 1,876 individual ‘specimens’: a record of how visitors to 'Where the Lost Language of the Dead Begins' were interpreted and rewritten through the logic of the system at a given moment in time. Together they formed an alternative body of events alongside Calvino’s original ten chapters - another possible version of what had occurred.
Where the Lost Language of the Dead Begins could not have taken place without the support of Elysium Gallery and funding from The Arts Council of Wales.
📹 Video by Happenin Studio
