Duration // 11'45"

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[neo]Lalia is an intermedia work for video and third-order ambisonics audio. Created as a companion work to Autoimmune, a collaboration with artist Marcos Serafim, [neo]Lalia would not exist without his generosity and artistic input.

Neolalia:
Noun // ne·​o·​la·​lia // nēōˈlālēə
Speech, especially of a psychotic nature that includes words that are new and meaningless to the hearer.

[neo]Lalia is a meditation on the human voice and the intersection of the organic and the artificial. Aesthetically, in this work I’m seeking to engage with the liminal points which can be found between these two concepts. To this end, both the video and audio were constructed with the assistance of machine-learning systems, which were trained using a corpus of hours of recordings of human speech. This training was then utilized to manipulate elements across the audiovisual spectrum, including the manipulation of newly recorded materials, the synthesis of completely new materials, the distortion / fragmentation of video, and so on. Though often highly chaotic and removed from its source material, materials which are innately human can be found throughout the entirety of [neo]Lalia.

The title of the work further serves to tie this work to my previous [re]//Glossolalia project, which similarly meditated on the sonic qualities of human speech.