Glut: A Superabundance of Nothing

Glut: A Superabundance of Nothing

released on Sep 22, 2021

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Glut: A Superabundance of Nothing

released on Sep 22, 2021

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 Hedva’s 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 Hedva’s 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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I actually created the entry in the IGDB for this game - I really wanted to log and recommend this. So please, download it here: http://glut.website/

It's a haunting experience, that manages to achieve a lot with very little and has some interesting perspectives to offer - if you can get into or are into mysticism, that is. Introducing amazon and AI into this whirlwind of ideas really took me off-guard.

The many, many translations of the game into text or video for acessibility purposes are also very fascinating to me; breaking the game down into components, adding additional components, it's all part of the translation process.

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