Folding Artificial Words (2026)
Folding Artificial Words is an audio-video essay that engages with AI technologies from an oblique critical perspective. The work is grounded in my personal experience of working as a transcriber for AI projects in a business process outsourcing company between 2023 and 2025. Audio transcription is a widespread form of AI data work necessary for the training of AI algorithms that operate with natural language. As a transcriber, I was listening every day, hours in a row, to audio recordings captured from users of digital devices, some of whom seemed unaware of being recorded. The audio fragments were provided by The Client (a major tech company whose name cannot be revealed because of nondisclosure agreements).
The audio track for this piece is based on the recording of a small, private performance, without spectators, in which I have tried to remember as closely as I could and reproduce, in a given time frame, as many fragments of the transcribed audio files as possible. I then used generative methods to manipulate the resulting audio track beyond recognition and visualised the results as a series of interwoven grids that respond to the sound frequencies. Other generated sounds are gradually introduced to further play with the folds in the visual representation of these strings of unrecognizable words. The result subtly problematizes the interrelation between the artificial and the natural in Artificial Intelligence by hinting towards the artificial algorithmic processing and exploitation of natural language, the robotization of human workers involved in the production of AI algorithms (which are advertised as possessing human-like intelligence), but also towards the artificiality of “natural” human perception, memory, and intelligence in the first place.
The visualisation of sound gives way to the pixelated image of a microscopic ciliate (probably a Stentor), a messy amateur microscope recording from my personal archive. Words, in their originary technicity, folded and distorted beyond recognition, intertwine with the artificial representation (the microscopic image) of an intensive becoming that eludes direct understanding.
The ambiguity of these gaps between what is perceived as natural and what is perceived as artificial is offered to the spectator as a fertile ground upon which contradictory, heterogeneous senses could sprout.