Rating: 98%
Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows)
Genres: Indie
Themes: Horror
Keywords: anime
Perspective: Third person
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: NIS America
Glut: A Superabundance of Nothing
Summary:
GLUT (a superabundance of nothing), by Johanna Hedva, is an inquiry into the knowings and unknowings of embodiment. It is a sound work composed with divination and AI, which manifests as both an immersive physical installation and videogame. The core of GLUT is a sound composition made entirely of Hedvas voice, ranging from its rawest expression of screams, to two AI vocal clones that, in order to trick the surveillance tactics embedded in AI, have been manipulated to sound ever more de-human.Disturbed that proprietary vocal-clone software services reserve the right to sell client voice data to governments and corporations, Hedva worked with artist, musician, technologist, and writer Jessika Khazrik to deceive the software, training it with Hedvas voice disguised through multiple vocoding processes. Hedva and Khazrik created two vocal clones: Arid and Mud, neither of which are made from an actual human voice and therefore not actual vocal clones. In GLUT, these two AI voices speak a text corpus that Hedva built over four lunar cycles, and synthesized through various divination techniques. The corpus is composed of the writings of medieval mystics (mostly of the apophatic tradition); theoretical physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers writing about black holes, dark matter, night, and nothingness; poets and novelists on sleep, music, and the voice; and the algorithm of amazon.com.In the game, users are a teratoma avatar that drags itself through an environment cheating at non-Euclidean geometry through a series of nesting black holes, intestinal tunnels, glittering caves, and oceans of black water. It is a digital experience that mirrors the physical installation (shown at the HKW Berlin) while producing a world that disorients as much as it confirms what knowledges are available to the body.
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