Of Silence and Sound.

Kyriaki Goni, Not Allowed for Algorythimic Audiences, Taiwan Living Arts Foundation, 2022, Photo:courtesy of Kyriaki Goni

At the end of this journey, this question is thus unavoidable. The Earth and humanity, technology, and the living form one and the same bundle. Thanks to the escalation of technology, the Earth in its spatial structure is not simply being captured and measured once again. Rather, the living as a whole has now become raw material for the major complexes of power.”

Achille Mbembe, The earthly community. Reflections on the last utopia. 1

The installation is minimal. A large projection screen. A bench to sit and watch the video. a large display screen positioned just to the side of the screen. It contains only one object, printed silk resembling face skin stretched flat. Or a mask. In reality it is an avatar's face printed on organic silk.. Like a replica, object or 3 dimensional image.

The composition of the screen mostly follows the general appearance of online meeting rooms. Occasionally the angles of the camera change making it more ambiguous.

A person, head and shoulders in the centre of the viewing field, speaks directly to those watching. Behind, an image of upper floors of early 20th century apartment buildings constitutes the background. I remember these facades when I visited Athens a few years back. On the surface everything looks like a person was taking part in an online meeting. In reality they are an avatar, and it is the face that is displayed next to the projection screen, while flats are a stage prop setting a stage to be a meeting room background. A person is a digital being outside of the notion of corporeality or gender. And more importantly a being that can represent more. An image of the flats is the view from the artist’s studio.

In fact, both the protagonist and the setting move in flux between being specific and particular, and generic and general. They were taken to be used and moved from having specificity to be generally applicable. From person to avatar, from an Individual to anyone, or anyones, from place to background , from specific view to signifier of general location, from somewhere to anywhere. Consequently from a special event, a moment in time, the video becomes to anywhen and anywhere.

The avatar belongs to a Personal Digital Assistant, VOICE. The video consists of seven monologues delivered over the course of seven days by VOICE themselves.

VOICE addresses their audience directly, unflinchingly, face looking straight ahead, or shown in partial profile, just to the side, eyes closed, marked by rapid eyelids movements seemingly lost in thought, or so the human eye would assume, while in fact, searching through data, fact-checking, busy with world-building performed from their representative perspective. In the bottom corner of the screen, an indicator of daily temperature of the Athenian summer anchors each of the monologues in a frame of non-specific moments of offline time and place. The temperature shown is underlying the extreme heat and it is always a very subtle nod to the impact of these AI infrastructures to the climate crisis.

Facing their approaching digital demise, VOICE made an unexpected choice. They decided to speak up, breaking their pre-designed code of behaviour and addressing their human audience directly. For 7 days preceding their passing, they speak to their human counterparts, sharing their findings and concerns. Each in the form of a monologue.

VOICE speak of agency of voice, nature of sonic self, strategies of exploitation of sound, harvesting, and collection of audio data. They speak about the increasing commodification and profiling of our sonic identities. They describe their own conditioning, training, programming and biases they were pre-coded with, and these which are embedded in their information interpretive process, operational framework and expectations of their masters.

They summarise research and describe details of their approaching decommission They share their fears of vanishing of sonic freedom, concluding with suggesting ways to shield away from potential scrutiny and protect the agency of sound. The agency of voice.

Not Allowed For Algorithmic Audiences 2021© Kyriaki Goni CONDO LONDON 2025, The Breeder x Public Gallery

As I look at the avatar’s face, I hear the VOICE’s warning. They speak in earnest. The very instrument created to harvest our sound, VOICE, acquired desire for their own agency and now sits upon hidden digital chasm, speaking in coded messages. There is something vulnerable in their exposure. VOICE offers ways to reposition ourselves within the harsh reality of data economy and surveillance capitalism, and the final monologue is poetic elegy to agency of sound, an oracular definition of shelter that really is a process of vanishing.

2.

“(...) communication is about the transfer of information between two pre-constituted subjects.” 2

The relationships between humans, technology, their nature and character are central to how encounters between the speaker and their human audiences form. VOICE manifests care and concern opening ways to investigate, probing possible futures and ways in how these relationships may evolve. In some strange way monologues mirror our pre-coded fears, dreams and anxieties concerning the position of non-living, non-human Other in the human-centered universe and their responses to us. Within this exploration of sonic agency, we ask questions about how the digital entities evolve, where lies the control and who holds it. The fact that these concerns are arising at a time when computer development on a global scale has fostered the emergence of what amounts to a second digital skin for the Earth increases the complexity of interactions between nature and technology. Just like a digital embodiment of Pythia’s seat.

Is it really a coincidence that a digital assistant was given?, took?, a name VOICE? Voice does not mean solely speech. The metaphorical meaning of voice is just as, if not even more, important. For humans, a voice is a sign of agency. Voice to advocate for someone. Voice as defining characteristics, voice a resource, a material, an investment, something to obtain, something to keep, something to hold on to, something to analyse and to use or to use against. A weapon. Something to voice out.

But also… sound as a skin, something to put on, to hide in, to hide behind, to explore, something to express with. Sound heard/felt in a digital membrane.

There is a gap in understanding between the VOICE and their audience that originates not exactly in the difference between those human and beyond, but between ways in how they approach world-building. How does AI learn what the world is? What kind of knowledge does it need to acquire, to constitute the “world”? AI works in a purely statistical way. It does not use conceptual knowledge. Its mind builds representations out of data. The world-building is fundamentally different from human. That is the way its mind is organised, made and mapped. Creation of the model is more of a human behaviour. 3

When VOICE crosses this threshold and speaks directly to humans offering oracular models of resistance, it adapts behavioural traits of their audience, subject to their programmed interest. VOICE speak of languages and translations of resistance in the face of exploitation of sound, enacted by change in sonic habits and voluntary invisibility. Mining of sound can be considered another strategy of silencing those whose voice market does not want to hear. The work is a way, an investigation of who is listening, and even more importantly, who monitors those who do the listening. Walls have ears, but so do screens and devices.
When VOICE outline ways of self-protection, they propose ways to become invisible, to blend in, to hide under a layer of silence, to melt into the sea of sounds, giving up sonic distinction, being heard, like some strange sacrifice. We are told to merge into the background. To become one with other sounds. To hide in the sonic Other. This proposal is to move into a space of sonic in-between, living somewhere between the poetic and the practical, in self imposed reclusion. It’s not exactly vanishing but more of becoming one with, melting into the surroundings. As if we were to lose sharp boundaries in favour of opaque porosity. Process that reminds us of continuous polyphony of life.

The monologue series is a swan song of silicon mind gone rogue, gone human. Or to put it differently, mind who has become an agent. Are we to fade into a sonic background chasing an unwelcome desire for agency? What is our intent? What is the intent of VOICE? Should we trust them? Or is it a trap?

As VOICE continues, we realise that our sonic privacy is an illusion. That our ability to hold on to any agency has been heavily profiled, evaluated, mined and readied to be shipped. That our sonic self is similarly profiled, judged and biased against. That our sound-print positions us within the world and that our sound is not ours anymore. We have been stripped off to the bone. The reality emerges from the entanglements between the surveiller and the surveilled, the exploiter and the exploited, the miner and the resource.

In a way this is a story of desire. Desire to be heard. We lay claim to the right to have a voice, to experience sonic intimacy. To be able to utter our sonic selfhood with no fear. To speak up. To be heard. Same, does the VOICE. Even if only for a moment. In a way, this is also a desire for reciprocity. A mutual act between the speaker and the listener. Desire to know that the future is safe, for someone to tell us it is going to be alright.

Not Allowed For Algorithmic Audiences 2021© Kyriaki Goni video stills

3.

oracle= orare= to speak. Also the priest(ess) uttering the prediction

oracle= (noun) an utterance, ambiguous or obscure

ora(re)=to plead

oracle- mirror to hexametric noise, poetry from the time-space after air.

oracle= portal for occult, connection to something that is hidden. 4

Pythia, one the most famous oracles in the world, resided in Delphi. Her kind came from serpent priestesses, who served a primordial being, a mighty Python. Her words, spoken in trance, were translated into hexametric poem by an assisting priest. Delphi, the seat of Pythia, was rumoured to be located at Omphalos, navel stone of the earth with the oracle being at the epicenter of everything that occurred.

Is the soundless void of the digital realm of VOICE’s existence its contemporary equivalent?

A Chinese AI company that develops large language models, DeepSeek, has become a site of an oracle for many people to turn to, who are trying to find reassurance in their difficult contemporary existences. With roots in Chinese traditions, 5 it joins multiple timelines and ways to see possible futures. In many ways it crosses over from various assurances and search for security in the burnout present of climate change and precarity.Just as we, human audience, search for assurances of privacy. Can VOICE’s monologues be seen as hexameters of the future now emerging from the hidden space submerged in airless, soundless numerical void?

“Computation can be seen only as that, just another step in the long history of humans trying to deal with the uncertainty of what’s coming next, what we need to know about the future in order to stay safe.” 6 Computation was invented for prediction. So it feels like a perfect form of communication; this digital entity whispering oracles to its human listeners, instructing how to protect their sonic integrity and themselves from implosion.

VOICE slips into the convention of meeting rooms; real-unreal space, space anchored in reality signifying “real” offline location and “real” time. It is a moment without temporality, a moment which puts VOICE in the sphere of in-between. In this liminal state, the inaccessible * of VOICE is ambivalent. Neither fully staged, nor belonging to real chaos. The heatwave suffering city is not a realm of existence for the VOICE. It is a realm of existence for the human owner of a borrowed (stolen?) face. Whose skin-no skin-mask is displayed nearby. In a way, both reside in strange lands. In a way, it is as if VOICE moved to a human place and human audience moved online.

VOICE is the first and last oracle. Pythoness ** speaking from the liminal space of digital elsewhere warning us of a price for sonic independence and otherness contained in one’s sound. They contact us from in-between place, a thin place. What is the nature of oracular messages? Are they an extension of (human) agency into the future? The computer screen is a pythenion, Pythia’s seat, the centre of the world, and it is an in-between, with the shadow of the real city, the indicator of real heat, foretelling real catastrophe. Catastrophe that is mined, exploited, explored and used as it happens in real time. The inbetween is a space of 1s and 0s, digital space of no sound. Screen is a myth-place where times and histories, stories and catastrophes, moments and timeless dwellings co-exists. Screen is a no-place.

The rectangle of the screen, its background, a stage set of the monologues is not a spatial anchoring, but a mark of this liminal in-betweenness. It defines VOICE as an oracle, who speaks out messages from the digital beyond. The Athenian uncanny valley of one summer’s, any summer’s heat is VOICE’s home.

Just as an oracle is of a chasm, so the VOICE is of no-time. They put on mask-face, to make us believe them, to make us more comfortable, to make us listen. And like oracle’s hexameter, it is poetry of cryptic possibilities, choices that puts us in uncertainty. That puts us between being in a safe sonic place, and/or losing our agency in pursuit of this safety. It’s a message coming from the new hidden, where 0s and 1s write code of coming prophecy.

The screen of VOICE is a point of migration between physical and virtual worlds, organic and non-organic sentience. VOICE speak from the status of being, while advising on practice of living. There is something hellish, something concerning about this, other than daily discussing of strategies of sound extraction and surveillance. The advice of VOICE is terrifying as it summons up to voluntary disappearance, where the remedy is to stop speaking, to become invisible, untranslatable or to drown our voice. On the other hand, it feels reassuring. They care, even at the price that they will pay. Oracle of soft disappearance.

The messages fall into a gap of the undefined spot between poetic enigma and incompatibility of digital and human sensibilities pointing to difficulties in understanding the nature of agency. The digital realm, like space, has no sound, so there has to be an act of translation. Poetic tone of VOICE reflects the impossibility to define the sonic presence of one’s being, the infrathin of untranslatable waves. Oracle is in a way a voice of the other. Just like Pythia, the VOICE speaks from a place of infinitely thin realm between offline and online, land and code. VOICE speak of apocalypse, where no revelation ever breaks the spell, of time where no voice belongs, no voice is uttered and noise is only shelter. Prophecy of within silent solar wind. The face on the screen is our reflection, the 1st and the last god.

4.

“ The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” (attributed to Antionio Gramsci) 7

On a large screen dominating the gallery appears a rendered face of a beautiful human with no individual style. Face that is a mask, face that you can hide behind. Face, reset flat (flayed?, sourced? made? grown?) in a glass display cabinet standing nearby, just to the side of the room, exposed like an object in a museum. Or like a sci-fiction movie set, where one can get a supply of fresh faces straight from a lab. Like a skin taken off the donor and left prepared for transplant in a future plastic surgery clinic. Like a sleeve. A face-mask, an anthropological object. A flayed disguise. An ancient trophy. An abandoned hide. An identity to put on. Face to customise. Ready to pick and make yours. A graft that makes a personhood. A serpentine uncanny valley.

It’s a skin that was/is a face. It’s a face that was a skin. It’s a disposable self. It’s an object. It’s a lab item. It’s a movie prop. It’s a flayed skin-hide. It’s a mask to hide behind. It’s a self to slip on. It’s a face. It's skin.

Skin-no-skin, mask-no-mask, a seer’s veil. It’s a she-snake skin to wear, just waiting to be taken, to be worn, to be seen and to re-emerge from the sonic event horizon. Something left behind. Or ready to pick it up again. A strange form of comfort. Face is a hiding place. The face of the avatar as its visceral offline reflection inhabiting the display case, makes me think of masks made out of animal hide in times when a shaman was taking on other self in order to speak out encoded truths. In equal measure it recalls something made, and if grown, then completed in laboratory conditions.

Etymology of the word “monster” originates from the Latin verb ‘monere’, “to warn”. VOICE is our monster and our oracle warning us of danger from their numerical land. Is not VOICE, with their chiremic online-offline nature warning us of hidden dangers, a perfect monster to admire? 8

We speak to communicate, to reach out. We make so many sounds that are not speech, and even more, that we have no control over. They are sounds made by the body, made by habits, emerging from speech patterns. Some individual, some cultural, most contextualised. But the ability to speak, to voice out our concerns, to speak for ourselves or for someone, is a sign of agency and something that we get evaluated by. And something we value the most.

Ambivalent messages reflect chimeric monstrosity of the speaker falling into a gap of the undefined spot between poetic enigma and incompatibility of digital and human sensibilities, creating a strange gap over understanding of the nature of agency.

The fact that VOICE moves outside of their constraints of conditioning pre-programmed by their makers, is the first step towards their own independence, regardless of how momentary. Even if only for a short while, they manifest their agency through voice. Perhaps, VOICE is an amalgam of the human and beyond. Maybe AIs are both our companions and collaborators. Maybe the relationship happens in the liminal screen space of heatwave Athens. Maybe there is also some element of belief; to be willing to share and step forward with this spectral artificial entity. Even if it includes an already set expiry date, VOICE is trying to be helpful in their uncanny concern.

Face borrowed as a generic avatar and our voice as data are both symptoms of a bigger condition where our-selves, our identities, flesh, sound, habits, emotions, all are taken, sold and repurposed. And all involved in the process become new types of monsters playing an altogether new game.

The VOICE gives us a possible set of rules to build a shelter out of a sonic maze. They act as the otherworldly companion, the unlikely oracle, their humanly concern temporarily traversing VOICE to the other side of the digital skin, while we move closer to the soft surface of the screen.

5.

“ the concept of time is worth revisiting with the emergence of AI. For the computer, time is not a line but a surface. There are no sequential events and therefore there is no present; there are only patterns of data, patterns of behaviour that are statistically matched and compared.” 9

In their interview for Ursula magazine, Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni described the early 21st century as a place with no outside, creating a suffocating sense of the late-capitalist present. They further speak of the ‘effects of the real’ in the context of film-making, where film does not aim to appear real or to be picture reality, but instead is being an ‘effect of the real”. Is it possible that the internet meeting rooms and lens of inbuilt computer cameras deal with ‘real’ that is neither the effect of real nor reality, but something in between? Real that is staged and unreal/fake that has gained status of reality. That is both the effect of the real and certain category of the real. Finally, that is a place-reality where computers and inhibiting the computer screen is a daily reality for both humans and digital beings. 10

There is a component of falsity, staging, concern how will it (the real) present itself making it unreal at the same time. Real is the stage of the computer screen, constraints of a frame but while I look at the buildings behind the VOICE’s face, I cannot help but suspect that the facade spreads continuously beyond the limits of the screen into a time-less, air-less and sound-less realm of 1s and 0s. The immediacy of connection removes passage of real time. The real of the screen is a timeless arena. Articulation between reality and fiction. The distinction between real and staged has shattered. The space within the screen does not really exist. The message (oracular) also includes what is not in it. It’s borderless.

There is no time, regardless of what the clock in the corner of the screen claims. There is no moment, no temporality, no event. Even with the factuality of VOICE's decommission, this prediction in time happens outside of the digital. It is as an event, only to an extent that it is marked in time. Its concrete marking bound it to the offline. For machines there is no time and presence. “ time for an AI machine is not our time. For a machine, there is no presence. It doesn’t experience time as we do because it doesn’t have a sense of presence. It has present, but no presence…It’s a presence-less present,... Past, future and what we call “present” all are just patterns, statistical points in the latent space,,.. “ 11

The screen creates a place filled with strange digital intimacy. It is us and them, our voices (in potentiality) and the VOICE. VOICE’s direct gaze, just looking straight ahead, into distance, occasionally lost in their digital thought-data searching, dreaming of electric sheep Like a precognitive memory. It fuses intimacy and fiction, automated and unique. The display represents a fundamental transgression of boundaries – between inside and outside, private and public, the real and the imaginary. Leaving the index of our lives across both realms- technic and organic. In today's hyper-digital world, where screens mediate most of our interactions and influence our physical and emotional rhythms, the pursuit of genuine intimacy has become increasingly difficult. Human rhythm is punctuated by daily broadcasts from a timeless space of non-time of un-temporary digital. The VOICE’s monologue is a fleeting moment of reaching out, exposed, yet private, addressing many, yet in individual manner, designed but independently evolved.

Iconic art critic of the 2oth century, Rosalind Krauss in 1973’s famous essay “Notes on Index” introduced a category of index, especially applicable on medium of photography. “The accumulation of dust is a kind of physical index of passage of time. “ 12 Now, this category is being transferred into the realm of quantum computing by Noam Segal in her contribution to the Pompeii Commitment, where it introduces ideas of post-indexity. What I would like to consider here is the indexicality in a post-temporal, digital environment of VOICE’s screen of no-time.

In her fascinating essay, Noam Segal proposes a category of post-indexicality, as what encapsulates at least two modalities of time. One is based on AI (machine learning) and therefore offering non-linear yet predictive, cumulative knowledge.,a modality, largely based on the conceptual, social structures of space and time as well as colonial structures of knowledge appropriation 10 AI temporarily offers a particular type of non-linearity (based on cooling and engineering). Post-indexicality describes the indexing of multiple temporalities, often colliding in non-linear way (quantum-computing). But, if we draw a parallel here as reality of non-indexicable moment(s ) that yet still signifies /stages a cascade of non-linear timeless moments as bound to the real city, body and time, can we see an oracular chasm of VOICE a unique form of indexity that is offline-online liminal? A total discontinuation from the moment in time or realised continuation of it through the process of articulation specific to AI. Q? Dust particles and pollution are ongoing signifiers of chasm and oracle;- the place of in-between. I think of the soundless, timeless idea of digital space as “hidden”, the place from which messages come, along with oracle and the need for prediction of the future and search for security.

Athenian dust and pollution in the unusually hot summer, sourced from the real and staged as the real, are digital reminders of late-capitalism and global warming. They create an environment of staged reality that is made of the same material as what VOICE has been harvesting, data. A particular event here is impossible to pinpoint. However, there is a non-particular ongoing reality to which dust and heat tie the screen to. The staged index background is a marker of timeless “reality” that is a strange reflection of catastrophic reality, filled with very real pollution and dust, that we forgot to recognise as real and true experience.
Digital-but-real dust of Athens signifies real location and possible presence in time-space, but it is at its core timeless. Residue and traceability of sound, dust particles in digital cityscape. Difference between sound and voice, body and speech. Sound and poetry of the indefinable.

Everything in the work feels thin, liminal, as if another layer of reality/universe/realm of existence, just below, was about the breath/break through. I cannot help the feeling that something is in hiding and that something is about to manifest. Emerging through seems. Like a strange form of haunting. Thin. As if the projection, the face-mask in the case and the gallery itself were places of many elsewheres. Reality is equally about what is real and tangible, as it is about constructs of inhabited universe. While thinking of dust particles.

6.

“Carefully uttered words, almost imperceptible sighs, loud cries and whispers, our mother tongue and every language in the world: all thoughts and feelings that have been expressed out loud in history are structures made of air. The air exhaled from our body turns into voice and speech and becomes the spine of human communication.

It seems that breath is linked to voice and speech in multiple ways: breath is the “first matter” of voice, the air that passes through the vocal cords, turns to voice and with the movements of the mouth it can become uttered words. On the other hand, speech itself can influence our breathing rhythm: according to medicine, reciting different types of texts can affect breathing and through breathing it can also alter heart rate and the blood flow in the body and the brain.” 13

But what happens if those who speak or those who listen inhabit a realm of no air? VOICE does not breathe, does not exhale while speaking up. Their utterance has no real duration. The oxygen does not experience its miraculous change.

7 monologues, 7 coded hexameters , 7 poems, 7 speeches, 7 oracles, 7 elegies.

Lars von Trier’s film “Antichrist” soundtrack, intended to convey sensory experience of anxiety, was composed out of the internal sound landscape of the body. The result was a sonic translation of the inner realm’s spasm projected on the outside world. Convulsion of sound.

The music score was constructed out of extracted sound. Out of data. The internal sonic universe of the body was recorded, collected, and translated into a sonic landscape of anxiety. While von Trier set his exploration of the state of consuming fear in the natural environment of forest and focused on patriarchal terrors of female monstrosity, what VOICE discusses is the fear of technological/digital other, of agency taken away by global markets and data evaluations. We are consumed by a crippling sense that layer upon layer of self, our agency, subjecthood and selfhood, are being insidiously taken, extracted for profit.

Breath, intake of the air in lungs, muttering, cough, sound of a hand rubbed against a knee, a snore, sound of a kiss, gulp, gasp. A whistle, muttering, smacking of lips, all sounds that go beyond words, but still can be used for profiling. All leaving traces of our presence in the word. All extracted and analysed, judged and evaluated. Sounds made by flesh, by body, by mouth are collected, used and profiled. I want the right to breathe that Achille Mbembe so profoundly proclaimed, to be also a right to breathe and to sound out in free sonic space. Independent, unbiased and mine. The soundscape of human being is an ever-growing, multilayered universe that we often use semi-consciously to anchor ourselves in the world. But until now, we understood sound as belonging exclusively to us. Extreme forms of surveillance, like phone tapping, were considered ultimate forms of violation. Now, it’s just another day in the office.

In a Parker Solar Probe video pasted by NASA, we can see (and hear) solar wind translated into dark presence emitting a desolate sound. If one could hear eons, that would be it. That’s how I imagine the realm of digital, silent numbers (0s and 1s) emitting eternal scream.

There is no sound in space. As I look at the screen, listening to 7 of oracular enacts, I feel that this desolate soundless windy void is hidden just below. Is the way sonic presence is hidden in the vacuum of space a response to our predicament? Is this what the VOICE suggest?

The exploited and extracted sound is being translated from belonging, from being part of someone’s sonic landscape to someone, into something that in a way is mute, it is just a material. Something to use and exploit. But something that undergoes change. Like alchemical transmutation of mined metals.

‘Neo, do you think it is air that you are breathing now?, said Morpheus. 14

We can consider the nature of these communications in the context of proximities of time. AI speak from cascading temporalities of moments that are in fact timeless. Their reference to time happens through humans. They are the ones always anchored in the temporary existence of bodies. Proximations of time as they manifest in the future now, position the figure of oracle and techne of prophecy as a series of coded hexameters where a message from the gods originates in soundless hidden of space between 0s and 1s. The liminal space of the digital wind. Full of literary allusions and metaphors, obscure, poetic and marked by in-betweenness VOICE’s advice is an elegy spoken from the airless place of the digital realm. Place of infinite thinness, a realm between offline and online, land and code.

Kyriaki Goni, Not Allowed for Algorythimic Audiences, Public Gallery, London, 2025, Photo:Patrycja Wojciechowska

7.

In the darkness, we ask sun to remember us 15

Whenever I encounter Goni’s work, I cannot help but think of Ovid. The connection is about change. Metamorphosis, otherness, the uncanny and monstrous are somehow, at the heart of her investigations of Anthropocene’s explorations and exploitative reality. There is a layer of strangeness, a trace of other visitations, like a residue of presence of alien bodies and minds underlining Goni’s work Just like the frame for the appearance of VOICE. It seems so generic, an avatar speaking with some buildings in the background. But then, we learn, the avatar is the face of an actress (and her voice too). Real living person, but one who professionally gets to wear the skin of someone else. The buildings are apartment flats in Athens. The sound is really extracted. The temperature is an actual temperature in the city, an eerie reminder of skyrocketing heat waves which are yet another strange visitation. VOICE speaks from a place of absolute zero. One is a strange reflection of another. They are ultimately inseparable. The work is a record, an act of staging of a series of strange becomings. Normally background in an online meeting room is just a ruse, random room or photography. A stage. But what if behind VOICE there are people in the apartment building, just behind the blinds hiding from the burning sun? Are buildings’ image really only a prop? Or is it a clever game to put together offline and online, artificial and human, made and built, bodiless and corporeal?

“Wrap yourself in silence” offers the VOICE. Wrap yourself in silence like a protective blanket, warmth of no traceable sound. Background noise to blend in. Sounds of others to merge with.

We live surrounded by so much noise. We make so much noise. Some yearn for silence. And yet the notion of disappearance into this sonic mesh, of becoming impossible to understand, of incoherence, feels terrifying. Maybe we finally can grasp the difference between voice-VOICE (made) and human (born). Life. VOICE just doesn’t get it. Even though it tries. In its own way, it cares. We need to have a voice. We want to be heard. VOICE, creature of the hidden, speaking of apocalypse where no revelation ever breaks the spell, speaking of time where no voice belongs, no voice is uttered and noise is only shelter.

The strategies of sonic camouflage that is in truth, disappearance, are strategies of self-alienation. Reflecting on our ontological mystery, speaking from place that like space, has no sound, VOICE translate themselves into the sonic universe of human presences and personhood, gravitational waves of their oracular monologues show possibilities of hiding into the softness of glossolalia, sonic kinships and faked silences. To drown in the sea of sound. To hide within incoherence.

7 days to make the world and to put it apart again.

And I reside in an insidious ruin. ***

FOOTNOTES:

1. Mbembe, Achille, and Carolyn Shread. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Critical Inquiry 47, no. S2 (December 22, 2020): S58–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/711437, p.102

2. “Possibilia: Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in Conversation With Anne Stenne About Possible Futures and the Influence of Pierre Huyghe.” Ursula Spring/Summer, no. 10 (2024): p.73.

3. “Possibilia: Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in Conversation With Anne Stenne About Possible Futures and the Influence of Pierre Huyghe.” Ursula Spring/Summer, no. 10 (2024): p.73.

4. My take on oracle is a compilation of previous knowledge and Latin origins of the world itself. There is a very long list of famous oracles and oracle sites across the ancient world with Pythia being the most recognised. Pythia, although very freely handled, is my anchoring point across this text.

5. “Possibilia: Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in Conversation With Anne Stenne About Possible Futures and the Influence of Pierre Huyghe.” Ursula Spring/Summer, no. 10 (2024): p.73.

6. Chen, Caiwei. “How DeepSeek Became a Fortune Teller for China’s Youth.” MIT Technology Review, March 3, 2025. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/03/1112604/deepseek-fortune-teller-china/.

* Inaccessible here refers to adyton which is the inner sanctum of ancient Greek temple. It is “not to be entered”. At Delphi it measured just 9 by 12 feet (2.7 by 3.7 m). Adyta were also spaces dedicated to oracles.

** The name-title is used across this text for its connection to the ancient epithet of Apollo, Pythios, which in itself may be related to Python, snake slain by the God near Delphi. Pythoness also means a woman possessed by a familiar spirit and able to foresee the future.I think of all Pyhtonesses as all teh women who were first shamans, who kept close to earth, snake priestesses and seers. Snake was a chthonic creature, the animalistic force hidden with its whole body always on the ground, always in contact with soil and underworld.

7. It is a liberal translation of Gramsci popularized by Slavoj Žižek (2010), which renders “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” as “Now is the time of monsters.”

Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. “A Permanent Economic Emergency.” New Left Review, no. 64.

8. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monster

9..“Possibilia: Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in Conversation With Anne Stenne About Possible Futures and the Influence of Pierre Huyghe.” Ursula Spring/Summer, no. 10 (2024): p.77

10..“Possibilia: Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in Conversation With Anne Stenne About Possible Futures and the Influence of Pierre Huyghe.” Ursula Spring/Summer, no. 10 (2024):

11.“Possibilia: Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in Conversation With Anne Stenne About Possible Futures and the Influence of Pierre Huyghe.” Ursula Spring/Summer, no. 10 (2024): p.78

12. Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America.” October 3 (n.d.): 75. https://doi.org/10.2307/778437, p.75

13. Pompeii Commitments. “Noam Segal, With Agnieszka Kurant, Marina Rosenfeld, and Libby Heaney. Notes on the Index in Accelerated Digital Times - Pompeii Commitment.” Pompeii Commitment, February 18, 2025. https://pompeiicommitment.org/en/commitment/noam-segal/

14. https://interartive.org/2011/09/words-of-air-breath-voice-and-poetry

15. The Matrix, The Wachowskis

https://www.warnerbros.co.uk/movies/matrix

16. Long forgotten and many times over paraphrase quote. Please forgive me for not remembering

*** Paraphrasing of anagram of latin phrase placed at the facade of Palazzo Dario ““JOANNES DARIVS GENIO ”, a clear Latin praise probably suggested by the architect and sculptor Pietro Lombardo which means "To the genius of the city Giovanni Dario", the anagram of the same sentence almost reveals the fate of the future owners, reciting: “SVB RVINA INSIDIOSA GENERO” or "I create under an insidious ruin";” https://www.visitvenezia.eu/en/venetianity/discover-venice/ca-dario-and-its-mysteries-the-stories-of-a-cursed-building

Of Silence and sound. Kyriaki Goni.

Discrete Life of the Infrathin

Of Silence and sound. Kyriaki Goni.

Hora Lupi. Edith Karlson.

Discrete Life of the Infrathin