Points of Articulation is an artistic research project exploring the politics and poetics of synthesised speech. It takes as a starting point the deep history of speech synthesis, which has roots in classical antiquity and encompasses West-African percussion music, Medieval literature and Renaissance automata, as well as modern day innovations in robotics and AI. The history of speaking machines and our changing attitudes towards them illuminate a longstanding fascination with animating the inanimate; through creative engagement with these tools I hope to explore complex and timely questions about technologies of knowledge production and the human body.

We live in a cacophony of artificial voices; a chorus of ‘smart’ assistants, customer service avatars, navigation systems, advertising voiceovers and deepfakes which become more difficult by the day to distinguish from the real thing. Whilst the ubiquity of these digital, incorporeal voices is reasonably new, fantasies of artificial bodies are not; they featured in Hellenistic scientific writing and mythology, in literature and historiography in the Middle Ages, and they began to take shape in Renaissance Europe in the form of sophisticated and imaginative automata. Tales of celebrated scholars combining arcane knowledge, technical innovation and diabolical magic to create clairvoyant talking heads illuminate complex relationships between nature and artifice, mechanics and magic, and between different types of intelligence and knowledge in pre-modern thought. They also resonate, I think, in quite an uncanny way with current discourse around technology, the body, creativity and labour in the wake of recent developments in machine learning and generative AI. In Points of Articulation I weave together historical and contemporary narratives, using sound and music to explore the politics and poetics of synthesised speech.