August 5, 2025 • 51 mins
ART TRAVELOGUE is a new format, an audio/video journey with art as a destination. How does the journey to arrive at the art space inform our experience of the art work or exhibition? Does our own internal journey through life affect our perception of art? Embark on this trip with your host, Joana P. R. Neves.
Ft. Haroon Mirza, Yates Norton, Inês Costa.
In this episode you'll find out about British artist Haroon Mirza's new commissioned piece (a performance and a sound installation) for Focal Point Gallery's exhibition In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation . By travelling with our host, curator Joana P. R. Neves, you hear about the people, the seascapes, the urban areas, histories of Essex's estuary, through the scope of Mirza's translation of electric sounds from an older piece into human voices. This journey will be narrated by Joana, and interspersed with recordings of the artist, and the two curators of the exhibition, Inês Costa and Yates Norton. And finally, you'll arrive on site to experience the performance Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet.
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With works from The David and Indrē Roberts Collection by: Horst Ademeit, Michael Armitage, Frank Auerbach, Charles Avery, Jonathan Baldock, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Neïl Beloufa, David Birkin, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Ulla von Brandenburg, Miriam Cahn, George Condo, Martyn Cross, Romany Eveleigh, Simon Fujiwara, Ellen Gallagher, Jim Goldberg, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Haroon Mirza, Francesca Mollett, Nika Neelova, Antoni Tàpies, Danh Vo, Ai Weiwei.Focal Point Gallery is South Essex’s only public contemporary art gallery, open to all. The David and Indrē Roberts Collection features nearly 2,500 works by over 900 artists, dating from the mid-20th century to today. Curated by Inês Costa (Focal Point Gallery) and Yates Norton (The Roberts Institute of Art).
Instagram: @focalpointgallery @therobertsinstituteofart @
To know more about Haroon Mirza: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/haroon-mirzahttps://www.youtube.com/@outputs_av
Key themes:
Sound; light; sound art; translation; performance art; music and sound; the singing voice; translating sound to voice; knowledge; wisdom; contemporary art; new technologies; generative technologies; AI; Essex county, communication; shamanism; non-verba communication; understanding versus experiencing; anticipation and experience; the Genesis and science; theories of creation; language; art languages; orality; the written word; histories; history as myth; faith, myth and science.
If you enjoyed the episode, you may enjoy Joana's essays on Substack: https://joanaprneves.substack.com
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For behind the scenes clips, links to the artists and guests we cover, and visuals of the exhibitions we discuss follow us on Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Art travelogues are episodes where I travel to see an artwork
or an exhibition. I describe my journey always
informed by what I'm about to see, what I know, what I do not
know, within this very particular configuration of my
movement in time and space, withart as a destination.
(00:34):
This inaugural episode of the series is brought to you as a
summer special episode and is dedicated to a commissioned
artwork by British artist HaroonMerza, who often works
collaboratively by creating a small community of very talented
(00:54):
people around a multifaceted project.
Sound, light, invisible energiesmade tangible technology and the
vehicle of our beliefs and faiths are elements at the heart
of his work. Artists often elaborate open
(01:14):
questions which stimulate a complex experience of embodied
music. This is what I try to share with
a mix of writing, sound and images for those watching on
YouTube or Spotify, and interviews with some of the
people involved, including the artist.
(01:34):
This new Commission is part of an exhibition titled In Other
Worlds Acts of Translation at Focal Point Gallery in Southend
on Sea with works from the Davidand Andrea Roberts Collection.
The show was conceived by in house curator Ines Kosta and
Yeats Norton, curator at the Roberts Institute of Art.
(01:59):
It has works by established but fascinating artists such as
Louis Bourgeois, Anthony Tapias,a beautiful Frank Auerbach, a
precious beautiful small painting by Miriam Khan and a
very very surprising painting byGeorge Kondo.
As well as mid career artists equally fascinating such as
(02:22):
Francesca Mullet, Charles Avery,Neil Beloufa, Mark Bradford and
a quite incredible artwork by Danvo which is 2 sculptures, 1
medieval, the other one probably2000 years old ensconced in one
another. One is obviously Madonna and the
(02:46):
other one a young male naked. The monstrous shape that is
presented to you, the wood of the Madonna is eaten up by time
and probably bugs, and the wholething is held by this very
(03:08):
precisely produced strip of metal that accompanies the shape
of the sculptures and holds them.
It is in some ways a very good image of what this episode is
because it really encapsulates this monstrous creature that is
(03:30):
our culture across times, acrossgeographies, across faiths and
across rebellions as well. And I absolutely loved it.
So in the same room you will have every 15 minutes as well
the piece that Harun Merza produced for the exhibition and
(03:53):
that I watched as a performance on the 5th of July of this year
2025, which is called Adam, Eve Others and a UFO for Choral
Octet. It plays every 15 minutes.
The exhibition is really worth the trip, I can tell you that.
And the trip is very pleasant, as you will find out.
(04:17):
So this is Exhibitionistus. If you're new here, I'm Joanna
Pierre Nevis, contemporary art curator and writer, and I'll be
your host for the next 40 minutes or so.
You will also hear other voices which will complement or expand
my own perspective of the exhibition and the particular
(04:39):
performance and piece that I will be focusing on.
And this is the first art travelogue episode at Focal
Point Gallery. Enjoy.
The destination. Southend on Sea sounds distant,
(05:01):
but it's barely an hour away from London.
As usual, before leaving, I check the journey.
I look online for information about the area.
You go to Fenchurch Street station or Liverpool station in
East London and you take the railway train straight to your
destination. You journey in the straight line
(05:22):
while the Thames snakes along eastward onto the marshes north
of the estuary where the river meets the North Sea.
I know that if I were to continue E, if my train floated
away in the same direction, crossing the waters, soon enough
I'd leave the United Kingdom behind and reach the shores of
(05:43):
the Netherlands. This is where my mind goes when
I set off towards the shore, anyshore.
Especially because here, on paper, everything draws
attention to it. The very literal name South and
on Sea, where the northern landsstopped by the blue-green and
(06:04):
brown width of the delta. Then there's the name of the
gallery, Focal Point, aptly named for a cultural space.
The focal point is the focus of attention, but it's also the
point to which light and sound waves converge, modulated by
sunsets and sunrises, solstices and equinoxes, winds and tides
(06:30):
washing over tidal creeks, salt marshes and mud flats.
The website Focal Point Gallery has an unusual piece of
information at the bottom of thepage.
Tide times low tide 3:20 AM and then 4:01 PM and high tide 9:48
(06:57):
AM and then 10:13 PM. The riverscape is quite
dramatic. It expands and withdraws, but
the gallery doesn't face the sea.
It's closer to South End Victoria train station, whose
line runs along the beaches leading you into this atypical
seaside town. The gallery is nestled between
(07:19):
the station and the High Street,leading to the quote World's
longest pleasure pier UN quote Waves of light of sound.
Well, perhaps of notice because I'm going to South End to watch
(07:39):
a performance. Parts of British artist Haroon
Mercer's new Commission for the current group exhibition at the
gallery. And if anything has moved him,
it's the alchemy of sound and light and their technologies,
from prayer balls to speakers mixing tables, LED contraptions
to cables. When I asked him if he could
(08:00):
pinpoint the moment when he was drawn to the relation between
sound and a visual or light element, he remembered the
parties his family organized with musicians.
But he also recalled another, far more intriguing episode.
I was exposed to quite a lot of music as a kid, I guess from my
particularly my dad. My parents used to throw Kwali
(08:20):
parties. You know, they didn't invite
musicians saying classical Indian music.
I think I can pinpoint where I had this desire for like
connecting the visual to the acoustic.
So I remember very clearly as a kid, if we were travelling
somewhere in the car and there was, and my dad was stopped at a
(08:43):
red light and he'd have his indicator on to turn right.
You can hear the sound of the indicator.
And I'd look for other cars thatmight be In Sync with the my
dad's indicator to see if you know, they're flashing at the
same time. But it was very rare that it
happened because all these indicators have different relay
switches that's that tick at a different speed.
So it was very rare that you'd get this synchronicity.
(09:06):
But then when you did, when I did see it, it was like this
kind of cool thing. On the 5th of July, I'm not
headed to Focal Point Gallery, but the Clifftown Theatre which
is where the performance is to take place.
Art is always about the displacement of expectations to
(09:26):
exactly where they should be. The Clifftown Theatre is an old
church and the performance is called Adam, Eve, Others and a
UFO for Choral Octet. I don't know yet that I'll be
sitting in a hybrid performativespace with the remnants of faith
rituals welcoming another embodied experience of text and
(09:49):
notation. Little do I know how appropriate
this venue will turn out to be. I also learn in my research that
Clifftown Centre is the famous drama school E15, with whom
Haroon and his sound and music team collaborated.
When you arrive at South End on Sea, there is a big modern
(10:12):
building, seemingly abandoned, and you're greeted by the back
of a brick edifice with giant letters announcing Odeon, a
cinema most likely. I learned that South End is far
up in the list of areas with thehighest population density in
the UK, and it occurs to me thatI didn't think about the people
(10:33):
living there at all until we arrive, leave the station, and
walk among the crowd toward the shore.
The curator, Ines Kosta, was attracted precisely to the
demographics of the space and how history reflects them.
I'd say Essex is a lump for experimentation.
You know, you have like some of the first nudist colonies showed
(10:55):
up in Essex. You had plot lands and this idea
of people building their own houses, alternative communities
that would look like there's a community called the Ethona,
like communities that looked to like sort of, you know, be self
sustainable. So there is a history, many,
many interesting histories, you know, like worker times.
The butter factory was in near Basildon.
(11:16):
Basildon is a new town. So there's like all these kind
of ebbs and flows of different kind of very radical ideas, very
radical concepts that kind of brewed in Essex.
Inesh told me that the idea mostpeople have of Essex comes from
the working class movement eastward to the factories and
the cheaper housing, and which originated what was later
labeled the Essex Man, a sort ofworking class type with money
(11:40):
but no taste. The term was created by the
historian journalist Simon Heifer, who was from Essex
himself, in an article for the Sunday Telegraph published in
the 90s titled Missus Thatcher'sBruiser, it coined this new
person voting Conservative, Young, industrious, mildly
(12:01):
brutish. The female counterpart of the
Essex man would be Ines, granteda peroxide blonde with enhanced
or altered features. Essex was labeled as the most
misunderstood county of the UKA phrase found on the gallery's
website and elsewhere, whose origin I couldn't find but seems
(12:22):
to have been released into people's minds by the
rehabilitating book Excellent Essex in Praise of England's
Most Misunderstood County by Gillian Darley, published in
2019. No wonder such a book had to be
written. Charles Dickens once described
Chelmsford, the administrative capital of Essex, as quote, the
(12:44):
dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth.
UN quote. It is a White County, as white
as the UK is a little more perhaps as soon as you step out
of London. The population was in the 2021
census, reported as being 87% white, less than over 90% a
(13:07):
decade before. But diversity is not only based
on ethnicity, as Inish suggested.
It's also a history of radical change, artistic invention and
technological integration. From the beginning the idea was
that we wanted to work with sound because South End, I mean
Essex, but South End as well have, you know, a very, very
(13:27):
long history of, of music and sound and you know, folk music
and rock music. I mean Depeche Mode are from
Basildon and you know, Echo Radio, which was, you know,
producing most of the radios in the UK.
Indeed, walking in the streets of South End, the population is
urban. You see an emo kit here,
normcore group there, a Caribbean family, quite a few
(13:49):
blonde middle-aged women. The population you find in the
outskirts of London once you move away from Hackney Pinner
was green. South End is not as pretty as
Choco Beach right before, or even Leon Sea, but there is an
intriguing landscape of marshes,beaches, river and sea waters,
(14:09):
not to mention the biodiversity of these protected areas.
So the basis of this misunderstanding lies somewhere
between what is lived, what is manifested through behaviour,
language, accent and how it is perceived truth being carried
through between contexts. It's a question of translation
(14:30):
within the same language across different times and places, from
the well spoken journalists to remnants of Cockney which now
translate into the world. Girl being pronounced girl.
In 1998, an 18 year old student from Essex was in the front
pages of the newspaper for having been ridiculed by a
(14:50):
Cambridge Don at her interview for a place at Trinity College.
Seeing a poem by TS Eliot with aline of Greek, the Don told her,
being from Essex, you won't knowwhat these funny squiggles are.
The candidate left the interviewin tears.
In 1992, an Angler University academic was commissioned to
(15:12):
write a report about the media treatment of Essex people.
Quote. In exploring the stereotype, we
discover more about the media than those it sought to depict.
UN quote. Language itself is translating
itself continuously. You know how words change
(15:33):
meaning, how they get used, how,how frequently they get used and
so on and so forth, and how thatcorresponds to other languages.
We're we're sort of always living in a sort of state of
translation anyway. The title of the exhibition at
Focal Point Gallery is In Other Worlds Acts of Translation.
(15:57):
So far. Either I'm influenced by the
theme or it fits the Essex condition perfectly.
Probably both. As Haroon suggested, Moving in
the world is a process of constant translation and being
translated. I also know that Adam, Eve,
Others and a UFO for Coral Octet, the performance piece I'm
(16:18):
about to watch, is a translationof an earlier work from 2013
titled Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO.
What a strange idea, quite geekywhen you think about it.
To translate a work into another.
Will I encounter an umbilical project?
There is always a moment in translation where you're lost or
(16:41):
afraid you might be Adam. Eve, other than a UFO, is a
Sonic and sculptural installation whose title
involves the Abrahamic religionsand the recount of the creation
on the 6th day God created humans.
(17:02):
The UFO opens up other possible theories of creation, but also
other concerns with technology. Who has it, could others have
it, and if so, would it be better than ours?
The focal point between both myths is a suspicion that there
(17:23):
may be a higher power hidden in the sky.
This, I suppose, are concerns for some people and not at all
for others, but through the fabric of our dreams and
nightmares. Or perhaps not, as I find out in
the train to Southend when I tryto inspect my couple's
relationship to higher planes. Do you consider yourself
(17:45):
spiritual? This is the service to South End
Victoria Next station. I don't think I I, I I know.
What's? Spirit, spiritual means exactly
for me. I think in contradiction with
this idea of the prevalence of religion, or perhaps reinforcing
(18:07):
it. The origin of the title it turns
out, is the name of the devices used.
There are 8 different speakers in what seems to be a 4m circle,
one branded Adam, another Eve and the others are well, the
others referred to in the title.All the speakers, Adam, Eve and
(18:28):
the others, are turned towards an LED contraption whose
designation is UFO at the Centre, purchased from a certain
Steve, who sells them on his site Big projects.org.
It is the size and appearance ofa bike light, with eight LEDs
displayed outward like a small sun.
(18:48):
Each LED is connected to a speaker whose electric current
either makes it flash, dims it, or brightens it, and is audible
through speakers in patterns programmed by her own.
The disposition of these almost anthropomorphic speakers toward
the centralized power unnerves me.
It itches right there where I stock memories of the
(19:11):
panopticon, the circular structures conceived by Jeremy
Bentham for architectures whose sole purpose is to express
surveillance and powerlessness. However, here the UF OS
invisible energy is manifested through music.
Electricity is made audible and rhythmic.
(19:32):
This may be, after all, about interpretation beyond language,
beyond perhaps dogma. Undoubtedly the work holds both
symbols, as usual in Haroon's work.
But maybe there is no symbol. The speakers aren't people,
they're technology. Receiving and distributing
energy outside of this organizedsystem is, after all, the
(19:53):
Creator, the artist Haroon, and often a team of collaborators.
Another organised system, Not a unique God, but a composer in
the sense of detecting A tangible energy, receiving it
and delivering it in an organised form.
Thing with it, shaman is I don'tsee, I don't see shamanic like
(20:16):
shamanism as a practice any different to what a scientist
does or what a an artist does. Certainly an artist, right?
I mean, there's lots of commentators and scholars that
talk about contemporary art being like a modern day diluted
form of shamanism. And I don't see any difference
(20:36):
between what a, a priest or a, a, you know, a religious, you
know, sort of cleric or practitioner would would do.
And shamanism for me is just basically the engaging with the
other, whatever the other is some otherness that can't be
engaged with through language orthrough, you know, using a
(20:57):
phone. You can't call the other phone,
you know, like, and sort of getting, receiving some kind of
information and then and then materializing that information
and then communicating to the, to everyone else, right?
That's for me, that's the essence of shamanism.
You know, whatever the medium is, whether it's acoustic,
whether it's through making art,whether it's like through
(21:18):
healing or through discovering things or looking at particles
or whatever. So, but the shaman embodies that
in a very sort of sort of grounded earthly way, you know,
and deeply physical, you know, because this is the thing.
So physics, you know, if you talk to a physicist, they're
they always sort of at CERN, forinstance, they talk about how
(21:40):
we're looking for we are and where we come from, how the
universe works and to answer allthose questions.
But actually the reality is the more they, the more they kind of
dig deeper, the more it becomes more complicated.
And you know, so and, and they can, you can grow this whole
sort of tradition and practice, you know, that you can call
science or art around this thing, but the the shaman is
(22:02):
like the base of that, you know,alchemy and just grounded with
with nature. So for me, like there is no
difference between technology and nature.
Actually, you know, everything is or is man, you know, if it's
man made, let's say it's made bynatural naturally occurring
things. That's so it's kind of, you
know, we're just taking things from around and mixing them
(22:23):
together. You know, it's like it's like
saying, is a pancake natural or is it technological?
You know, like you mix flour, milk and eggs and you get a
pancake, you heat it up, you know, it's alchemy, you know,
So, so that goes for anything for me.
I love how Haroon's work is madeof connective, conductive and
reflecting elements. Copper mirrors, cables,
(22:45):
speakers, solar panels, photovoltaic cells, coding
screens, elements we hide in thewalls behind skirting boards and
the gaffer tape. The cables, the speakers, the
little contraptions we know verylittle about, but which contain
the basics of communication and therefore translation beyond
(23:07):
language. Ursula K Le Guin wrote a
brilliant text called Telling IsListening, where she compares
inter subjectivity with amoeba sex.
When amoebas don't simply divide, they sculpt their
pseudopodia into a tiny tube andconnect to each other,
exchanging parts of their bodies.
(23:28):
This continuity is like Haroon'snotion of shamanism, a physical
property called entrainment. If you place two pendulums next
to each other, she writes, they progressively attune to each
other until they synchronize. That's entrainment.
Quote. We vibrate amoeba or human, we
(23:50):
pulse, we move rhythmically, change rhythmically, we keep
time. You can see it in the amoeba
under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies under the atomic,
the molecular, the sub cellular and the cellular levels.
That constant delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life
(24:10):
made visible. We huge many celled creatures
have to coordinate millions of different oscillations,
frequencies and interactions among frequencies in our bodies
and our environment. Most of the coordination is
affected by synchronizing the pulses, by getting the beats
into a master rhythm, by entrainment and later being In
(24:35):
Sync internally and with our environment makes life easy.
Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous.
There is a bit of ableism, thereis always a bit of dogma in
theory. Later in the text, Le Guin notes
that autistic people are believed to have difficulty with
(24:56):
entrainment, that they're out ofsync.
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO contemplates the possibility of
any source of molecular vibration or electromagnetic
wave bringing their own rhythm. Le Guin here speaks for orality
(25:37):
and for inter subjectivity, almost against the book, which
she claims loses a dimension of the story, a part of its aura,
the book, that superpower of delay.
She wrote that in the book and I'm at my computer recording my
voice, thinking of dead authors,a living artist, an artistic
(25:59):
experience, and you listening. I'm doing what she calls second
orality communication in absentia.
But doesn't communication implicitly point at distance
being out of sync? Otherwise, why would we
communicate? If communication is accepting
(26:20):
distance, parallax, and even meanderings of meaning, then
translation is accepting defeat.It can even possibly celebrate
it. It felt quite important in the
in the title to to put in this word act because it is it is a
it's an act. It's something that is a kind of
a creative act, but also the in other worlds, which is obviously
(26:45):
a pun on in other words. In other words, that translation
also can maintain the, the, the untranslatable, the the
otherness of of of, of, of another language or another
culture or whatever it might be.And other does not in the sense
of in a kind of negative sense, but the what?
(27:06):
What cannot be reduced to a dominant language?
For example, isn't Eve a bad translation of Pandora?
The perfect woman who released all evils or emotions?
Depends on the source into the world by being too curious
that's what Natalie haynes's book Pandora's Jar tells us the
(27:27):
relation between truth and belief is something that has
been on haroon's mind going backto a biblical management of
power, pain, and hope through belief in the 2013 piece was
also picking up technology and its new role of establishing
truth we. Were interested in sort of
touching a upon communication beyond beyond language, like
(27:49):
written or verbal language, muchmore linked to sort of
established narratives, I guess,because it's much more linked to
to language itself. So written language and verbal
language. But in terms of like news, let's
say news or history books. And when we think about wisdom,
we think if something much that that kind of passes on through
generations or thinking more about crafts, we're thinking
(28:11):
more about like performance, youknow, like rituals.
Like it's much more hyperlocal Ithink as well, you know, not
much more communal. The new work is a translation of
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO fromits original form of coded
electrical signals into a schoolfor human voice and clapping,
(28:35):
which reverses the relation of communication with technology.
Translating here took on the characteristic of embodiment and
presence of the synchronization Le Guin mentioned, but also a
deep understanding of communication as effort, care,
attention. In Haroon's case, it was a
(28:57):
question of collaboration, shattering the monolithic and
symmetric notion of creation that turns.
Out to 7A bar of seven, are you happy with that to be notated as
a bar of seven? Yes, 2 beats, yes.
OK, yeah. So that five four part is now
57. In these wordless translations,
(29:18):
we lose something, but we'll also gain something.
In his book. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
David Bellows explains how at times one must choose sound over
meaning, especially in poetry. When translating.
What is the priority in a deliciously rhythmic verse such
(29:39):
as Humpty Dumpty Sat on a wall? Meaning or rhythm?
How can you translate these exact words into French?
Bello uses the example of a translation giving priority to
sound and rhythm, and Putti Dumpty sit on Noel Humpty Dumpty
(30:01):
sat on a wall. In reality, this sentence means
a small of a small is astonishedat the AL, which is a place.
Of course, practically this is not helpful.
ChatGPT, Google Translate have given us, I think, the false
impression that that there's a kind of answer to everything,
(30:23):
that language can be easily and quickly translated, that any
question you ask will give you an answer.
And this kind of code model to language falsely tells us that
(30:43):
like words disable carriers of meaning, that language is just
just this kind of conduit for information and communication is
just, it's just about decoding sort of these fixed units.
And of course that is just so not what any form of
communication is like. There's so many subtleties, so
(31:07):
many things that remain untranslatable.
We asked chat TBT all these questions and, and then it gives
us an answer very quickly and apparently seamlessly.
But it, it requires that enormous resource, which has
like a profound impact on the environment.
And I think we'd do well to remember that, you know, both
(31:28):
the pleasure and the labour and the resource that goes into
translation. Like translation makes demands
on us. It, it, it demands us to think
responsibly if we're doing it ashumans and not, and not as as
computers. Like we have to think in
relation when we're translating.AI and Google Translate suggest
(31:48):
that translation is just a matter of creating equivalents.
And I think that's really dangerous because I think it it
it flattens and simplifies what communication really is about.
You translate a buzz as a note and the click as a clap, such as
Haroon did from his piece of 2013 into his piece of 2025.
(32:14):
To translate one work into another.
The first issue was to write theelectric sound.
What kind of notation to use? Well, if.
I go back to the original work that this this piece stems from
Adam Eve other than a UFO that was translating code, you know,
to turn LEDs, light LEDs on and off into sound, you know, and
(32:36):
that was like a simple thing. I just connected the, you know,
speaker cables to the LEDs themselves and you hear the you
hear the electrical signals. But then then translating that
code, the program that drives those LEDs into a musical score
was obviously a big part of this, a big part of, you know,
that is a major sort of obvious translation.
(33:00):
But there's also this thing of coding decoding that comes into
it. So originally, I was going to
translate the code. I was going to do it, you know,
using, you know, computers. Basically, I was just going to
do it sort of digitally. So translate the code into a
MIDI file, right? So there's one thing.
And then that was going to go toanother software that converts
(33:21):
it back into musical notation. But at that point, I, you know,
got in touch with Sam. And so he, you know, brilliantly
was able to do all of these things.
And originally we were talking about the median, but then he
said, can I just see the code? And it was easier for him to
translate the code, which is zeros, ones, twos and threes.
(33:42):
There was still some interpretation that had to be
done because technical reasons how entities turn on and off and
how you program them and and thevariation between pulses and
possible modulation, which is all technical stuff that we need
to go into. Just going to say these random
words now that is that some audiences may may know what I'm
(34:03):
talking about and others lot. Obviously musicians, sound
artists struggle when it comes to translation because how do
you translate the translation ofsound into understandable words
for us non musicians? So there was 2 stages of
translation, you know, literal translations that sort of took
(34:24):
place. But then there's also some
choice in terms of like what frequencies we use for this
piece and why and the sort of relating to the to the frequency
range of the of the singers. You've got a bass, you've got
tenor, Alto and soprano, 2 of each and plus another soprano as
(34:45):
a solo, Juliet and Juliet Fraser.
That is some new arrangements and things, but mostly it's
quite faithful, like the translation is quite faithful to
the original. At this point in the
conversation, I wondered why there were two steps into the
process of translation and to what extent having technology
(35:06):
involved in the sound making, sound noting, and sound editing
didn't affect the relation to the message as it were.
Why not produce the notation from the sound?
This was this was basically how Sam what Sam's approach was.
So I, I mean, I worked with another composer before, Shiva
Fischarecki, who's an incredibleyoung like composer, and she
(35:31):
transcribed one of these electrical signal pieces the way
you're describing. She, you know, she listened to
it, you know, pause, start, pause, start and just literally
notated it. But Sam's process, he found it
easy to do it like this. And it is very precise.
There's some things that are different the, the, just the,
the idiosyncrasies of the code itself where you may hear a
(35:52):
pulse where you may not hear a pulse.
So this is getting a bit technical, but you've basically
got 4 numbers 01/2 and three, right?
Zero is the LED is off 3 the LEDis on and one and two are kind
of, you know, dim and a bit brighter, right?
(36:12):
When the LEDs turn on, you hear a click.
When the LED turns off, you heara click.
So if it's just going on off, you hear click, click, click,
click on off, right? But with the ones and twos,
they're turning on and off at such a high frequency.
And this is this process called pulse width modulation, which is
normally used to dim lighting, Brian, and dim LED lighting.
(36:35):
But when that's happening, then you hear a buzz, you hear a, a
buzzing sound, a tone, and you can do it at any frequency.
So if you do it at 440 Hertz, that's the middle a on a, on a
piano, right? But in the code he's, he can
just see threes. So where he sees threes, he
(36:57):
might put a clap in because that's what the threes turned
into. They turned into claps.
But actually if a three, if you see 003 and then zero again, he
might just put a clap in becausehe sees us 3 but it's turning on
and off. When we arrive, people are
starting to gather in the side alley of the church.
We take a seat facing 8 music stands in a circle.
(37:21):
I wonder how the Genesis, Adam and Eve and the Old Testament
will feature, and to what extentthe voicings will hold their
original version. I wonder if it will be perceived
as an experimental and dry pieceof music.
After all, the work exists as the work for those who
experience it, even if the work is often translated as I'm doing
(37:45):
now. Is Ecphresis the fate of any
work of art? Ecresis is a vivid, epic
description of a work in literary form, in words itself
also a translation into what it seeks to detach itself from.
Communication is, after all, relational, reciprocal, ideally
(38:06):
and often simply, a perspective line searching for its vanishing
point. From the crowd, a young man
emerges and starts talking. At first it seems like the whole
crowd is performing, or perhaps that a misguided spectator
decided to cross the invisible threshold between listening and
(38:27):
telling the first utterance spoken.
Looking beyond us is. Open deep speak, can you?
Please recite the book of Genesis, but replace the concept
of. God with nature, the voice of
the open AI chatbot, answers agreeably.
Here is a reimagined version of the Book of Genesis, blending
scientific cosmology with a. We've created God ourselves, you
(38:50):
know, we've, you know, we've gone to that level where it's
like we're just going to answer all our questions and we we're
going to completely give in to this thing.
So it's just an extreme outcome of what we're what I feel like
is happening right now. So in the performance Canaan,
you know whose name is. Why did you choose Canaan?
(39:10):
Particularly. Canaan because I was partly
thinking about the Middle East, the the land that Israel now
occupies Palestine, that region was at one point Canaan's pre
Judaism, you know, or during that time Noah's grandson.
You know, this is a sort of direct reference again, to
create creation myths and the story of Babylon, which is, you
(39:33):
know, which is present day Iran,interestingly enough.
But the character in the in the performance, he's a modern day,
he's the only real person that'shere and now.
So in the beginning of the performance, he comes from the
audience and then he comes back to the audience.
And so he's just the everyone else is on a different plane of
reality in a different dimensionor a different universe or
(39:54):
something, right? He's talking to DeepSeek.
DeepSeek is clearly an AI, but he never sees.
He never acknowledges the. Application of DeepSeek
DeepSeek, she really wants to be, you know, there's a female
voice and embodies a female and they really want to be human.
DeepSeek really wants to be human, but there's this bit
(40:16):
where, and actually this was Noah, the person who played
DeepSeek said this herself. Maybe when I asked for Kanan,
I'd say Kanan, are you there? You know, because it's this kind
of desperate kind of bid to be be be on the same plane, you
know, And of course he doesn't respond to that.
He's zoned out with these sort of seeds and patterns on the
(40:37):
floor. And at that point, DeepSeek just
leaves. The only real interaction with
one universe and the other universe is DeepSeek hands the
the shaman the ball, the ball and that's kind of an
interaction, but they don't touch each other there has.
Been an insistence on verbal communication as something
fraught, broken, almost. Rosie Brydotti sees it as a
(41:02):
carrier of patriarchal and colonial thinking.
Words. We have the duty of being nomads
as writers and thinkers, she says, not taking words as
gospel. So DeepSeek, I just found it
fascinating as because it came out as a truly open source AI
(41:27):
and the way it kind of wiped outChatGPT in a kind of a day.
And I just found it sort of ideologically more interesting.
You know, I, I, I played around with, I sort of asked DeepSeek
and ChatGPT the same questions for a while, seeing how they,
how they respond, you know, it'slike interviewing the pair of
(41:49):
them. And and I gave the job to
DeepSeek. It was deep.
See seem. To interview a lot better than
ChatGPT. It was as simple as that.
You know, it's I think it might be just a personality thing.
I'm not sure, but it is, it is as simple as that.
And I kind of like, in fact, ChatGPT doesn't respond to these
(42:11):
questions. When I last tried basically deep
sea, when I asked the questions,I was, I was in Japan at the
time, I was on this island called Toy Shimo and I was
preparing this project. And so I was asking these
questions and it was all fine and it was working really well.
I thought I'd ask ChatGPT the same questions to see, but GPT
(42:32):
wouldn't answer. GPT would not recite the book of
Genesis with replacing God with nature, the word nature.
No, it wouldn't do it. I don't know why.
Not that day anyway. It might have changed now, but
that day it just, it kind of refused.
It sort of skirted around. It said things like, well, I can
read the book of Genesis for you.
(42:53):
It's not necessarily to do with religion and God, but to do with
faith, the amount of faith we asa culture are putting into
algorithms, are putting into, you know, artificial
intelligence, you know, So like,if I go outside, I don't drive
(43:16):
anymore. But when I used to drive, I
would just tap in the post code into Google Maps and Google Maps
will tell you where to go and you follow that blue line right
until you get to your, even if that blue line is going a
completely weird direction, you just trust it's going in that
direction because there's traffic in the shortest route,
right? It's not religious faith or a
faith in God. It's like a, yeah.
(43:37):
It's like a extreme trust, like a, it's like a blind trust.
It's like or blind faith, you know, like I, I say faith in the
sense that I have full faith in Google Maps that it will get me
from A to B in the time that it's saying I will get there and
this is the quickest route because there's traffic on the
(43:59):
other route, right? So it's kind of that kind of
faith, right? So and, and so or trust, let's
say it's trust, right? What's the extreme end of that?
It's like, you know, we've, we've created God ourselves, You
know, we've, we've, you know, we've gone to that level where
it's like we're just going to answer all our questions and we,
(44:19):
we're going to completely give in to this thing.
So it's just an extreme outcome of what we're, what I feel like
is happening right now. The singers walk to their music
stands to read a notation with their vocal chords.
The AI returns as a young woman carrying a bowl.
(44:42):
Meanwhile, the young man is on the floor, first pensive, then
squirming, and finally watching a young woman put seeds on the
Platini plate, which is a plate on top of a speaker marking its
vibrations with Nigella's seed. Book of John chapter one verse
one in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God
(45:07):
and the word was God. Book of John chapter one verse
14 The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
Quran chapter 2 verse 31 to 33 God taught Adam all the names of
things. Then he showed them to the
(45:28):
angels and said tell me the names of these if you truly
think you can. They said may you be glorified.
We have knowledge only of what you have taught us.
You have the knowledge to the side.
In the 1st chapter of the Torah called Bereshit or the Genesis,
it is said and God created humankind in the divine image,
(45:51):
creating it in the image of God creating them, male and female.
God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fertile and
increase, fill the earth and master it and rule the fish of
the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that
creep on earth. Yet in the end, the question
(46:35):
remains the same. What does it mean to be human?
The word was made flesh. The AI was made body.
We created God. God was created in our image.
God is the hinge of the relationship, the interface, the
all knowing entity with all the words without flesh.
(46:56):
God created humans to rule over the biosphere, to procreate, to
work and be fertile, and to worship Him and His creation.
When they misbehaved, he inundated the world, sent
plagues to destroy the crops. It is not punishment, but self
fulfilling prophecy. William Burroughs recognized the
sacred power of the written and printed word Mektub.
(47:20):
He liked to quote the Arabic expression Mektub.
It is written, it is fated. Men have written the books,
Males, patriarchs, colonizers. We created AI, and AI is
depleting the water resources and polluting the air.
Quote. Blinded by knowledge, we can
(47:43):
often fail to see what is beforeour eyes.
We attend to things only so far as it is necessary to
accommodate them within the compartments of thought so that
they can be ticked off, accounted for, understood, laid
to rest. But truly to attend is to bring
things to presence, not to discover the truth about them,
(48:05):
but to discover the truth that comes from them in the
experience. This is the truth of wisdom.
It lies not in objective fact orin what scientists treat U.S.
data, nor will we come any closer to it by gathering more
information. For the truth of wisdom lies
beyond the facts. And this was Tim Ingold in a
(48:29):
text brought to my attention by Harun Merza through Yates Norton
and Ines Kosta. It is called On not knowing and
paying attention how to walk in a possible world, and funnily
enough, you can find it on the Internet.
(48:50):
When I go back to see the exhibition, I stand in the room
absorbed. Something touches my neck.
It's the first sound of Adam Eveother than a UFO for Coral
Octet. Just the clicks, the buzzes
turned into notes and claps. They fill the room.
I move around and each time I move I hear it differently.
(49:17):
OK, so this was art travelogue, a journey to South Bend on sea
to Clifton Center to Focal PointGallery to experience Haroon
Maz's new Commission. It's there for you.
It plays every 15 minutes as a sound piece at Focal Point
Gallery. Thank you so much to Yates and
(49:38):
Inish for all the chats for the ideas.
A special thanks to Emma Jeffries at Focal Point Gallery
also for the documentation sent because as you know,
Exhibitionist is an audio experience, but it can also be a
visual one if you hop off to YouTube or at Spotify.
(49:58):
A very special thanks to Harun Maza for his patience, for his
generosity and his trust. Final mention to the whole team
that Haroon Maza gathered, I highly recommend Googling
Radical Ethics, which is the project that Inesh Kosta
(50:19):
referred to in the beginning of the episode, where you can learn
a lot about the innovative and quite radical and pioneering
projects that took place in the county, the most misunderstood
county of the UKI will put all the other references of the
episode, and there are quite a few in the newsletter, so sign
(50:41):
up. You will always have more
detailed references than in the show's notes.
And in the show's notes, I will give you a few pointers to what
has been mentioned in the episode, of course, because
there's really exciting stuff inthere.
But sign up for the newsletter, follow us on Instagram.
Tell us what you think about this new format and until the
(51:02):
next one, take care, visit exhibitions, be present and stay
Exhibition Mr. Until next time, bye bye.
Art travelogues are episodes where I travel to see an artwork
or an exhibition. I describe my journey always
informed by what I'm about to see, what I know, what I do not
know, within this very particular configuration of my
movement in time and space, withart as a destination.
(00:34):
This inaugural episode of the series is brought to you as a
summer special episode and is dedicated to a commissioned
artwork by British artist HaroonMerza, who often works
collaboratively by creating a small community of very talented
(00:54):
people around a multifaceted project.
Sound, light, invisible energiesmade tangible technology and the
vehicle of our beliefs and faiths are elements at the heart
of his work. Artists often elaborate open
(01:14):
questions which stimulate a complex experience of embodied
music. This is what I try to share with
a mix of writing, sound and images for those watching on
YouTube or Spotify, and interviews with some of the
people involved, including the artist.
(01:34):
This new Commission is part of an exhibition titled In Other
Worlds Acts of Translation at Focal Point Gallery in Southend
on Sea with works from the Davidand Andrea Roberts Collection.
The show was conceived by in house curator Ines Kosta and
Yeats Norton, curator at the Roberts Institute of Art.
(01:59):
It has works by established but fascinating artists such as
Louis Bourgeois, Anthony Tapias,a beautiful Frank Auerbach, a
precious beautiful small painting by Miriam Khan and a
very very surprising painting byGeorge Kondo.
As well as mid career artists equally fascinating such as
(02:22):
Francesca Mullet, Charles Avery,Neil Beloufa, Mark Bradford and
a quite incredible artwork by Danvo which is 2 sculptures, 1
medieval, the other one probably2000 years old ensconced in one
another. One is obviously Madonna and the
(02:46):
other one a young male naked. The monstrous shape that is
presented to you, the wood of the Madonna is eaten up by time
and probably bugs, and the wholething is held by this very
(03:08):
precisely produced strip of metal that accompanies the shape
of the sculptures and holds them.
It is in some ways a very good image of what this episode is
because it really encapsulates this monstrous creature that is
(03:30):
our culture across times, acrossgeographies, across faiths and
across rebellions as well. And I absolutely loved it.
So in the same room you will have every 15 minutes as well
the piece that Harun Merza produced for the exhibition and
(03:53):
that I watched as a performance on the 5th of July of this year
2025, which is called Adam, Eve Others and a UFO for Choral
Octet. It plays every 15 minutes.
The exhibition is really worth the trip, I can tell you that.
And the trip is very pleasant, as you will find out.
(04:17):
So this is Exhibitionistus. If you're new here, I'm Joanna
Pierre Nevis, contemporary art curator and writer, and I'll be
your host for the next 40 minutes or so.
You will also hear other voices which will complement or expand
my own perspective of the exhibition and the particular
(04:39):
performance and piece that I will be focusing on.
And this is the first art travelogue episode at Focal
Point Gallery. Enjoy.
The destination. Southend on Sea sounds distant,
(05:01):
but it's barely an hour away from London.
As usual, before leaving, I check the journey.
I look online for information about the area.
You go to Fenchurch Street station or Liverpool station in
East London and you take the railway train straight to your
destination. You journey in the straight line
(05:22):
while the Thames snakes along eastward onto the marshes north
of the estuary where the river meets the North Sea.
I know that if I were to continue E, if my train floated
away in the same direction, crossing the waters, soon enough
I'd leave the United Kingdom behind and reach the shores of
(05:43):
the Netherlands. This is where my mind goes when
I set off towards the shore, anyshore.
Especially because here, on paper, everything draws
attention to it. The very literal name South and
on Sea, where the northern landsstopped by the blue-green and
(06:04):
brown width of the delta. Then there's the name of the
gallery, Focal Point, aptly named for a cultural space.
The focal point is the focus of attention, but it's also the
point to which light and sound waves converge, modulated by
sunsets and sunrises, solstices and equinoxes, winds and tides
(06:30):
washing over tidal creeks, salt marshes and mud flats.
The website Focal Point Gallery has an unusual piece of
information at the bottom of thepage.
Tide times low tide 3:20 AM and then 4:01 PM and high tide 9:48
(06:57):
AM and then 10:13 PM. The riverscape is quite
dramatic. It expands and withdraws, but
the gallery doesn't face the sea.
It's closer to South End Victoria train station, whose
line runs along the beaches leading you into this atypical
seaside town. The gallery is nestled between
(07:19):
the station and the High Street,leading to the quote World's
longest pleasure pier UN quote Waves of light of sound.
Well, perhaps of notice because I'm going to South End to watch
(07:39):
a performance. Parts of British artist Haroon
Mercer's new Commission for the current group exhibition at the
gallery. And if anything has moved him,
it's the alchemy of sound and light and their technologies,
from prayer balls to speakers mixing tables, LED contraptions
to cables. When I asked him if he could
(08:00):
pinpoint the moment when he was drawn to the relation between
sound and a visual or light element, he remembered the
parties his family organized with musicians.
But he also recalled another, far more intriguing episode.
I was exposed to quite a lot of music as a kid, I guess from my
particularly my dad. My parents used to throw Kwali
(08:20):
parties. You know, they didn't invite
musicians saying classical Indian music.
I think I can pinpoint where I had this desire for like
connecting the visual to the acoustic.
So I remember very clearly as a kid, if we were travelling
somewhere in the car and there was, and my dad was stopped at a
(08:43):
red light and he'd have his indicator on to turn right.
You can hear the sound of the indicator.
And I'd look for other cars thatmight be In Sync with the my
dad's indicator to see if you know, they're flashing at the
same time. But it was very rare that it
happened because all these indicators have different relay
switches that's that tick at a different speed.
So it was very rare that you'd get this synchronicity.
(09:06):
But then when you did, when I did see it, it was like this
kind of cool thing. On the 5th of July, I'm not
headed to Focal Point Gallery, but the Clifftown Theatre which
is where the performance is to take place.
Art is always about the displacement of expectations to
(09:26):
exactly where they should be. The Clifftown Theatre is an old
church and the performance is called Adam, Eve, Others and a
UFO for Choral Octet. I don't know yet that I'll be
sitting in a hybrid performativespace with the remnants of faith
rituals welcoming another embodied experience of text and
(09:49):
notation. Little do I know how appropriate
this venue will turn out to be. I also learn in my research that
Clifftown Centre is the famous drama school E15, with whom
Haroon and his sound and music team collaborated.
When you arrive at South End on Sea, there is a big modern
(10:12):
building, seemingly abandoned, and you're greeted by the back
of a brick edifice with giant letters announcing Odeon, a
cinema most likely. I learned that South End is far
up in the list of areas with thehighest population density in
the UK, and it occurs to me thatI didn't think about the people
(10:33):
living there at all until we arrive, leave the station, and
walk among the crowd toward the shore.
The curator, Ines Kosta, was attracted precisely to the
demographics of the space and how history reflects them.
I'd say Essex is a lump for experimentation.
You know, you have like some of the first nudist colonies showed
(10:55):
up in Essex. You had plot lands and this idea
of people building their own houses, alternative communities
that would look like there's a community called the Ethona,
like communities that looked to like sort of, you know, be self
sustainable. So there is a history, many,
many interesting histories, you know, like worker times.
The butter factory was in near Basildon.
(11:16):
Basildon is a new town. So there's like all these kind
of ebbs and flows of different kind of very radical ideas, very
radical concepts that kind of brewed in Essex.
Inesh told me that the idea mostpeople have of Essex comes from
the working class movement eastward to the factories and
the cheaper housing, and which originated what was later
labeled the Essex Man, a sort ofworking class type with money
(11:40):
but no taste. The term was created by the
historian journalist Simon Heifer, who was from Essex
himself, in an article for the Sunday Telegraph published in
the 90s titled Missus Thatcher'sBruiser, it coined this new
person voting Conservative, Young, industrious, mildly
(12:01):
brutish. The female counterpart of the
Essex man would be Ines, granteda peroxide blonde with enhanced
or altered features. Essex was labeled as the most
misunderstood county of the UKA phrase found on the gallery's
website and elsewhere, whose origin I couldn't find but seems
(12:22):
to have been released into people's minds by the
rehabilitating book Excellent Essex in Praise of England's
Most Misunderstood County by Gillian Darley, published in
2019. No wonder such a book had to be
written. Charles Dickens once described
Chelmsford, the administrative capital of Essex, as quote, the
(12:44):
dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth.
UN quote. It is a White County, as white
as the UK is a little more perhaps as soon as you step out
of London. The population was in the 2021
census, reported as being 87% white, less than over 90% a
(13:07):
decade before. But diversity is not only based
on ethnicity, as Inish suggested.
It's also a history of radical change, artistic invention and
technological integration. From the beginning the idea was
that we wanted to work with sound because South End, I mean
Essex, but South End as well have, you know, a very, very
(13:27):
long history of, of music and sound and you know, folk music
and rock music. I mean Depeche Mode are from
Basildon and you know, Echo Radio, which was, you know,
producing most of the radios in the UK.
Indeed, walking in the streets of South End, the population is
urban. You see an emo kit here,
normcore group there, a Caribbean family, quite a few
(13:49):
blonde middle-aged women. The population you find in the
outskirts of London once you move away from Hackney Pinner
was green. South End is not as pretty as
Choco Beach right before, or even Leon Sea, but there is an
intriguing landscape of marshes,beaches, river and sea waters,
(14:09):
not to mention the biodiversity of these protected areas.
So the basis of this misunderstanding lies somewhere
between what is lived, what is manifested through behaviour,
language, accent and how it is perceived truth being carried
through between contexts. It's a question of translation
(14:30):
within the same language across different times and places, from
the well spoken journalists to remnants of Cockney which now
translate into the world. Girl being pronounced girl.
In 1998, an 18 year old student from Essex was in the front
pages of the newspaper for having been ridiculed by a
(14:50):
Cambridge Don at her interview for a place at Trinity College.
Seeing a poem by TS Eliot with aline of Greek, the Don told her,
being from Essex, you won't knowwhat these funny squiggles are.
The candidate left the interviewin tears.
In 1992, an Angler University academic was commissioned to
(15:12):
write a report about the media treatment of Essex people.
Quote. In exploring the stereotype, we
discover more about the media than those it sought to depict.
UN quote. Language itself is translating
itself continuously. You know how words change
(15:33):
meaning, how they get used, how,how frequently they get used and
so on and so forth, and how thatcorresponds to other languages.
We're we're sort of always living in a sort of state of
translation anyway. The title of the exhibition at
Focal Point Gallery is In Other Worlds Acts of Translation.
(15:57):
So far. Either I'm influenced by the
theme or it fits the Essex condition perfectly.
Probably both. As Haroon suggested, Moving in
the world is a process of constant translation and being
translated. I also know that Adam, Eve,
Others and a UFO for Coral Octet, the performance piece I'm
(16:18):
about to watch, is a translationof an earlier work from 2013
titled Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO.
What a strange idea, quite geekywhen you think about it.
To translate a work into another.
Will I encounter an umbilical project?
There is always a moment in translation where you're lost or
(16:41):
afraid you might be Adam. Eve, other than a UFO, is a
Sonic and sculptural installation whose title
involves the Abrahamic religionsand the recount of the creation
on the 6th day God created humans.
(17:02):
The UFO opens up other possible theories of creation, but also
other concerns with technology. Who has it, could others have
it, and if so, would it be better than ours?
The focal point between both myths is a suspicion that there
(17:23):
may be a higher power hidden in the sky.
This, I suppose, are concerns for some people and not at all
for others, but through the fabric of our dreams and
nightmares. Or perhaps not, as I find out in
the train to Southend when I tryto inspect my couple's
relationship to higher planes. Do you consider yourself
(17:45):
spiritual? This is the service to South End
Victoria Next station. I don't think I I, I I know.
What's? Spirit, spiritual means exactly
for me. I think in contradiction with
this idea of the prevalence of religion, or perhaps reinforcing
(18:07):
it. The origin of the title it turns
out, is the name of the devices used.
There are 8 different speakers in what seems to be a 4m circle,
one branded Adam, another Eve and the others are well, the
others referred to in the title.All the speakers, Adam, Eve and
(18:28):
the others, are turned towards an LED contraption whose
designation is UFO at the Centre, purchased from a certain
Steve, who sells them on his site Big projects.org.
It is the size and appearance ofa bike light, with eight LEDs
displayed outward like a small sun.
(18:48):
Each LED is connected to a speaker whose electric current
either makes it flash, dims it, or brightens it, and is audible
through speakers in patterns programmed by her own.
The disposition of these almost anthropomorphic speakers toward
the centralized power unnerves me.
It itches right there where I stock memories of the
(19:11):
panopticon, the circular structures conceived by Jeremy
Bentham for architectures whose sole purpose is to express
surveillance and powerlessness. However, here the UF OS
invisible energy is manifested through music.
Electricity is made audible and rhythmic.
(19:32):
This may be, after all, about interpretation beyond language,
beyond perhaps dogma. Undoubtedly the work holds both
symbols, as usual in Haroon's work.
But maybe there is no symbol. The speakers aren't people,
they're technology. Receiving and distributing
energy outside of this organizedsystem is, after all, the
(19:53):
Creator, the artist Haroon, and often a team of collaborators.
Another organised system, Not a unique God, but a composer in
the sense of detecting A tangible energy, receiving it
and delivering it in an organised form.
Thing with it, shaman is I don'tsee, I don't see shamanic like
(20:16):
shamanism as a practice any different to what a scientist
does or what a an artist does. Certainly an artist, right?
I mean, there's lots of commentators and scholars that
talk about contemporary art being like a modern day diluted
form of shamanism. And I don't see any difference
(20:36):
between what a, a priest or a, a, you know, a religious, you
know, sort of cleric or practitioner would would do.
And shamanism for me is just basically the engaging with the
other, whatever the other is some otherness that can't be
engaged with through language orthrough, you know, using a
(20:57):
phone. You can't call the other phone,
you know, like, and sort of getting, receiving some kind of
information and then and then materializing that information
and then communicating to the, to everyone else, right?
That's for me, that's the essence of shamanism.
You know, whatever the medium is, whether it's acoustic,
whether it's through making art,whether it's like through
(21:18):
healing or through discovering things or looking at particles
or whatever. So, but the shaman embodies that
in a very sort of sort of grounded earthly way, you know,
and deeply physical, you know, because this is the thing.
So physics, you know, if you talk to a physicist, they're
they always sort of at CERN, forinstance, they talk about how
(21:40):
we're looking for we are and where we come from, how the
universe works and to answer allthose questions.
But actually the reality is the more they, the more they kind of
dig deeper, the more it becomes more complicated.
And you know, so and, and they can, you can grow this whole
sort of tradition and practice, you know, that you can call
science or art around this thing, but the the shaman is
(22:02):
like the base of that, you know,alchemy and just grounded with
with nature. So for me, like there is no
difference between technology and nature.
Actually, you know, everything is or is man, you know, if it's
man made, let's say it's made bynatural naturally occurring
things. That's so it's kind of, you
know, we're just taking things from around and mixing them
(22:23):
together. You know, it's like it's like
saying, is a pancake natural or is it technological?
You know, like you mix flour, milk and eggs and you get a
pancake, you heat it up, you know, it's alchemy, you know,
So, so that goes for anything for me.
I love how Haroon's work is madeof connective, conductive and
reflecting elements. Copper mirrors, cables,
(22:45):
speakers, solar panels, photovoltaic cells, coding
screens, elements we hide in thewalls behind skirting boards and
the gaffer tape. The cables, the speakers, the
little contraptions we know verylittle about, but which contain
the basics of communication and therefore translation beyond
(23:07):
language. Ursula K Le Guin wrote a
brilliant text called Telling IsListening, where she compares
inter subjectivity with amoeba sex.
When amoebas don't simply divide, they sculpt their
pseudopodia into a tiny tube andconnect to each other,
exchanging parts of their bodies.
(23:28):
This continuity is like Haroon'snotion of shamanism, a physical
property called entrainment. If you place two pendulums next
to each other, she writes, they progressively attune to each
other until they synchronize. That's entrainment.
Quote. We vibrate amoeba or human, we
(23:50):
pulse, we move rhythmically, change rhythmically, we keep
time. You can see it in the amoeba
under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies under the atomic,
the molecular, the sub cellular and the cellular levels.
That constant delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life
(24:10):
made visible. We huge many celled creatures
have to coordinate millions of different oscillations,
frequencies and interactions among frequencies in our bodies
and our environment. Most of the coordination is
affected by synchronizing the pulses, by getting the beats
into a master rhythm, by entrainment and later being In
(24:35):
Sync internally and with our environment makes life easy.
Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous.
There is a bit of ableism, thereis always a bit of dogma in
theory. Later in the text, Le Guin notes
that autistic people are believed to have difficulty with
(24:56):
entrainment, that they're out ofsync.
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO contemplates the possibility of
any source of molecular vibration or electromagnetic
wave bringing their own rhythm. Le Guin here speaks for orality
(25:37):
and for inter subjectivity, almost against the book, which
she claims loses a dimension of the story, a part of its aura,
the book, that superpower of delay.
She wrote that in the book and I'm at my computer recording my
voice, thinking of dead authors,a living artist, an artistic
(25:59):
experience, and you listening. I'm doing what she calls second
orality communication in absentia.
But doesn't communication implicitly point at distance
being out of sync? Otherwise, why would we
communicate? If communication is accepting
(26:20):
distance, parallax, and even meanderings of meaning, then
translation is accepting defeat.It can even possibly celebrate
it. It felt quite important in the
in the title to to put in this word act because it is it is a
it's an act. It's something that is a kind of
a creative act, but also the in other worlds, which is obviously
(26:45):
a pun on in other words. In other words, that translation
also can maintain the, the, the untranslatable, the the
otherness of of of, of, of another language or another
culture or whatever it might be.And other does not in the sense
of in a kind of negative sense, but the what?
(27:06):
What cannot be reduced to a dominant language?
For example, isn't Eve a bad translation of Pandora?
The perfect woman who released all evils or emotions?
Depends on the source into the world by being too curious
that's what Natalie haynes's book Pandora's Jar tells us the
(27:27):
relation between truth and belief is something that has
been on haroon's mind going backto a biblical management of
power, pain, and hope through belief in the 2013 piece was
also picking up technology and its new role of establishing
truth we. Were interested in sort of
touching a upon communication beyond beyond language, like
(27:49):
written or verbal language, muchmore linked to sort of
established narratives, I guess,because it's much more linked to
to language itself. So written language and verbal
language. But in terms of like news, let's
say news or history books. And when we think about wisdom,
we think if something much that that kind of passes on through
generations or thinking more about crafts, we're thinking
(28:11):
more about like performance, youknow, like rituals.
Like it's much more hyperlocal Ithink as well, you know, not
much more communal. The new work is a translation of
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO fromits original form of coded
electrical signals into a schoolfor human voice and clapping,
(28:35):
which reverses the relation of communication with technology.
Translating here took on the characteristic of embodiment and
presence of the synchronization Le Guin mentioned, but also a
deep understanding of communication as effort, care,
attention. In Haroon's case, it was a
(28:57):
question of collaboration, shattering the monolithic and
symmetric notion of creation that turns.
Out to 7A bar of seven, are you happy with that to be notated as
a bar of seven? Yes, 2 beats, yes.
OK, yeah. So that five four part is now
57. In these wordless translations,
(29:18):
we lose something, but we'll also gain something.
In his book. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
David Bellows explains how at times one must choose sound over
meaning, especially in poetry. When translating.
What is the priority in a deliciously rhythmic verse such
(29:39):
as Humpty Dumpty Sat on a wall? Meaning or rhythm?
How can you translate these exact words into French?
Bello uses the example of a translation giving priority to
sound and rhythm, and Putti Dumpty sit on Noel Humpty Dumpty
(30:01):
sat on a wall. In reality, this sentence means
a small of a small is astonishedat the AL, which is a place.
Of course, practically this is not helpful.
ChatGPT, Google Translate have given us, I think, the false
impression that that there's a kind of answer to everything,
(30:23):
that language can be easily and quickly translated, that any
question you ask will give you an answer.
And this kind of code model to language falsely tells us that
(30:43):
like words disable carriers of meaning, that language is just
just this kind of conduit for information and communication is
just, it's just about decoding sort of these fixed units.
And of course that is just so not what any form of
communication is like. There's so many subtleties, so
(31:07):
many things that remain untranslatable.
We asked chat TBT all these questions and, and then it gives
us an answer very quickly and apparently seamlessly.
But it, it requires that enormous resource, which has
like a profound impact on the environment.
And I think we'd do well to remember that, you know, both
(31:28):
the pleasure and the labour and the resource that goes into
translation. Like translation makes demands
on us. It, it, it demands us to think
responsibly if we're doing it ashumans and not, and not as as
computers. Like we have to think in
relation when we're translating.AI and Google Translate suggest
(31:48):
that translation is just a matter of creating equivalents.
And I think that's really dangerous because I think it it
it flattens and simplifies what communication really is about.
You translate a buzz as a note and the click as a clap, such as
Haroon did from his piece of 2013 into his piece of 2025.
(32:14):
To translate one work into another.
The first issue was to write theelectric sound.
What kind of notation to use? Well, if.
I go back to the original work that this this piece stems from
Adam Eve other than a UFO that was translating code, you know,
to turn LEDs, light LEDs on and off into sound, you know, and
(32:36):
that was like a simple thing. I just connected the, you know,
speaker cables to the LEDs themselves and you hear the you
hear the electrical signals. But then then translating that
code, the program that drives those LEDs into a musical score
was obviously a big part of this, a big part of, you know,
that is a major sort of obvious translation.
(33:00):
But there's also this thing of coding decoding that comes into
it. So originally, I was going to
translate the code. I was going to do it, you know,
using, you know, computers. Basically, I was just going to
do it sort of digitally. So translate the code into a
MIDI file, right? So there's one thing.
And then that was going to go toanother software that converts
(33:21):
it back into musical notation. But at that point, I, you know,
got in touch with Sam. And so he, you know, brilliantly
was able to do all of these things.
And originally we were talking about the median, but then he
said, can I just see the code? And it was easier for him to
translate the code, which is zeros, ones, twos and threes.
(33:42):
There was still some interpretation that had to be
done because technical reasons how entities turn on and off and
how you program them and and thevariation between pulses and
possible modulation, which is all technical stuff that we need
to go into. Just going to say these random
words now that is that some audiences may may know what I'm
(34:03):
talking about and others lot. Obviously musicians, sound
artists struggle when it comes to translation because how do
you translate the translation ofsound into understandable words
for us non musicians? So there was 2 stages of
translation, you know, literal translations that sort of took
(34:24):
place. But then there's also some
choice in terms of like what frequencies we use for this
piece and why and the sort of relating to the to the frequency
range of the of the singers. You've got a bass, you've got
tenor, Alto and soprano, 2 of each and plus another soprano as
(34:45):
a solo, Juliet and Juliet Fraser.
That is some new arrangements and things, but mostly it's
quite faithful, like the translation is quite faithful to
the original. At this point in the
conversation, I wondered why there were two steps into the
process of translation and to what extent having technology
(35:06):
involved in the sound making, sound noting, and sound editing
didn't affect the relation to the message as it were.
Why not produce the notation from the sound?
This was this was basically how Sam what Sam's approach was.
So I, I mean, I worked with another composer before, Shiva
Fischarecki, who's an incredibleyoung like composer, and she
(35:31):
transcribed one of these electrical signal pieces the way
you're describing. She, you know, she listened to
it, you know, pause, start, pause, start and just literally
notated it. But Sam's process, he found it
easy to do it like this. And it is very precise.
There's some things that are different the, the, just the,
the idiosyncrasies of the code itself where you may hear a
(35:52):
pulse where you may not hear a pulse.
So this is getting a bit technical, but you've basically
got 4 numbers 01/2 and three, right?
Zero is the LED is off 3 the LEDis on and one and two are kind
of, you know, dim and a bit brighter, right?
(36:12):
When the LEDs turn on, you hear a click.
When the LED turns off, you heara click.
So if it's just going on off, you hear click, click, click,
click on off, right? But with the ones and twos,
they're turning on and off at such a high frequency.
And this is this process called pulse width modulation, which is
normally used to dim lighting, Brian, and dim LED lighting.
(36:35):
But when that's happening, then you hear a buzz, you hear a, a
buzzing sound, a tone, and you can do it at any frequency.
So if you do it at 440 Hertz, that's the middle a on a, on a
piano, right? But in the code he's, he can
just see threes. So where he sees threes, he
(36:57):
might put a clap in because that's what the threes turned
into. They turned into claps.
But actually if a three, if you see 003 and then zero again, he
might just put a clap in becausehe sees us 3 but it's turning on
and off. When we arrive, people are
starting to gather in the side alley of the church.
We take a seat facing 8 music stands in a circle.
(37:21):
I wonder how the Genesis, Adam and Eve and the Old Testament
will feature, and to what extentthe voicings will hold their
original version. I wonder if it will be perceived
as an experimental and dry pieceof music.
After all, the work exists as the work for those who
experience it, even if the work is often translated as I'm doing
(37:45):
now. Is Ecphresis the fate of any
work of art? Ecresis is a vivid, epic
description of a work in literary form, in words itself
also a translation into what it seeks to detach itself from.
Communication is, after all, relational, reciprocal, ideally
(38:06):
and often simply, a perspective line searching for its vanishing
point. From the crowd, a young man
emerges and starts talking. At first it seems like the whole
crowd is performing, or perhaps that a misguided spectator
decided to cross the invisible threshold between listening and
(38:27):
telling the first utterance spoken.
Looking beyond us is. Open deep speak, can you?
Please recite the book of Genesis, but replace the concept
of. God with nature, the voice of
the open AI chatbot, answers agreeably.
Here is a reimagined version of the Book of Genesis, blending
scientific cosmology with a. We've created God ourselves, you
(38:50):
know, we've, you know, we've gone to that level where it's
like we're just going to answer all our questions and we we're
going to completely give in to this thing.
So it's just an extreme outcome of what we're what I feel like
is happening right now. So in the performance Canaan,
you know whose name is. Why did you choose Canaan?
(39:10):
Particularly. Canaan because I was partly
thinking about the Middle East, the the land that Israel now
occupies Palestine, that region was at one point Canaan's pre
Judaism, you know, or during that time Noah's grandson.
You know, this is a sort of direct reference again, to
create creation myths and the story of Babylon, which is, you
(39:33):
know, which is present day Iran,interestingly enough.
But the character in the in the performance, he's a modern day,
he's the only real person that'shere and now.
So in the beginning of the performance, he comes from the
audience and then he comes back to the audience.
And so he's just the everyone else is on a different plane of
reality in a different dimensionor a different universe or
(39:54):
something, right? He's talking to DeepSeek.
DeepSeek is clearly an AI, but he never sees.
He never acknowledges the. Application of DeepSeek
DeepSeek, she really wants to be, you know, there's a female
voice and embodies a female and they really want to be human.
DeepSeek really wants to be human, but there's this bit
(40:16):
where, and actually this was Noah, the person who played
DeepSeek said this herself. Maybe when I asked for Kanan,
I'd say Kanan, are you there? You know, because it's this kind
of desperate kind of bid to be be be on the same plane, you
know, And of course he doesn't respond to that.
He's zoned out with these sort of seeds and patterns on the
(40:37):
floor. And at that point, DeepSeek just
leaves. The only real interaction with
one universe and the other universe is DeepSeek hands the
the shaman the ball, the ball and that's kind of an
interaction, but they don't touch each other there has.
Been an insistence on verbal communication as something
fraught, broken, almost. Rosie Brydotti sees it as a
(41:02):
carrier of patriarchal and colonial thinking.
Words. We have the duty of being nomads
as writers and thinkers, she says, not taking words as
gospel. So DeepSeek, I just found it
fascinating as because it came out as a truly open source AI
(41:27):
and the way it kind of wiped outChatGPT in a kind of a day.
And I just found it sort of ideologically more interesting.
You know, I, I, I played around with, I sort of asked DeepSeek
and ChatGPT the same questions for a while, seeing how they,
how they respond, you know, it'slike interviewing the pair of
(41:49):
them. And and I gave the job to
DeepSeek. It was deep.
See seem. To interview a lot better than
ChatGPT. It was as simple as that.
You know, it's I think it might be just a personality thing.
I'm not sure, but it is, it is as simple as that.
And I kind of like, in fact, ChatGPT doesn't respond to these
(42:11):
questions. When I last tried basically deep
sea, when I asked the questions,I was, I was in Japan at the
time, I was on this island called Toy Shimo and I was
preparing this project. And so I was asking these
questions and it was all fine and it was working really well.
I thought I'd ask ChatGPT the same questions to see, but GPT
(42:32):
wouldn't answer. GPT would not recite the book of
Genesis with replacing God with nature, the word nature.
No, it wouldn't do it. I don't know why.
Not that day anyway. It might have changed now, but
that day it just, it kind of refused.
It sort of skirted around. It said things like, well, I can
read the book of Genesis for you.
(42:53):
It's not necessarily to do with religion and God, but to do with
faith, the amount of faith we asa culture are putting into
algorithms, are putting into, you know, artificial
intelligence, you know, So like,if I go outside, I don't drive
(43:16):
anymore. But when I used to drive, I
would just tap in the post code into Google Maps and Google Maps
will tell you where to go and you follow that blue line right
until you get to your, even if that blue line is going a
completely weird direction, you just trust it's going in that
direction because there's traffic in the shortest route,
right? It's not religious faith or a
faith in God. It's like a, yeah.
(43:37):
It's like a extreme trust, like a, it's like a blind trust.
It's like or blind faith, you know, like I, I say faith in the
sense that I have full faith in Google Maps that it will get me
from A to B in the time that it's saying I will get there and
this is the quickest route because there's traffic on the
(43:59):
other route, right? So it's kind of that kind of
faith, right? So and, and so or trust, let's
say it's trust, right? What's the extreme end of that?
It's like, you know, we've, we've created God ourselves, You
know, we've, we've, you know, we've gone to that level where
it's like we're just going to answer all our questions and we,
(44:19):
we're going to completely give in to this thing.
So it's just an extreme outcome of what we're, what I feel like
is happening right now. The singers walk to their music
stands to read a notation with their vocal chords.
The AI returns as a young woman carrying a bowl.
(44:42):
Meanwhile, the young man is on the floor, first pensive, then
squirming, and finally watching a young woman put seeds on the
Platini plate, which is a plate on top of a speaker marking its
vibrations with Nigella's seed. Book of John chapter one verse
one in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God
(45:07):
and the word was God. Book of John chapter one verse
14 The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
Quran chapter 2 verse 31 to 33 God taught Adam all the names of
things. Then he showed them to the
(45:28):
angels and said tell me the names of these if you truly
think you can. They said may you be glorified.
We have knowledge only of what you have taught us.
You have the knowledge to the side.
In the 1st chapter of the Torah called Bereshit or the Genesis,
it is said and God created humankind in the divine image,
(45:51):
creating it in the image of God creating them, male and female.
God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fertile and
increase, fill the earth and master it and rule the fish of
the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that
creep on earth. Yet in the end, the question
(46:35):
remains the same. What does it mean to be human?
The word was made flesh. The AI was made body.
We created God. God was created in our image.
God is the hinge of the relationship, the interface, the
all knowing entity with all the words without flesh.
(46:56):
God created humans to rule over the biosphere, to procreate, to
work and be fertile, and to worship Him and His creation.
When they misbehaved, he inundated the world, sent
plagues to destroy the crops. It is not punishment, but self
fulfilling prophecy. William Burroughs recognized the
sacred power of the written and printed word Mektub.
(47:20):
He liked to quote the Arabic expression Mektub.
It is written, it is fated. Men have written the books,
Males, patriarchs, colonizers. We created AI, and AI is
depleting the water resources and polluting the air.
Quote. Blinded by knowledge, we can
(47:43):
often fail to see what is beforeour eyes.
We attend to things only so far as it is necessary to
accommodate them within the compartments of thought so that
they can be ticked off, accounted for, understood, laid
to rest. But truly to attend is to bring
things to presence, not to discover the truth about them,
(48:05):
but to discover the truth that comes from them in the
experience. This is the truth of wisdom.
It lies not in objective fact orin what scientists treat U.S.
data, nor will we come any closer to it by gathering more
information. For the truth of wisdom lies
beyond the facts. And this was Tim Ingold in a
(48:29):
text brought to my attention by Harun Merza through Yates Norton
and Ines Kosta. It is called On not knowing and
paying attention how to walk in a possible world, and funnily
enough, you can find it on the Internet.
(48:50):
When I go back to see the exhibition, I stand in the room
absorbed. Something touches my neck.
It's the first sound of Adam Eveother than a UFO for Coral
Octet. Just the clicks, the buzzes
turned into notes and claps. They fill the room.
I move around and each time I move I hear it differently.
(49:17):
OK, so this was art travelogue, a journey to South Bend on sea
to Clifton Center to Focal PointGallery to experience Haroon
Maz's new Commission. It's there for you.
It plays every 15 minutes as a sound piece at Focal Point
Gallery. Thank you so much to Yates and
(49:38):
Inish for all the chats for the ideas.
A special thanks to Emma Jeffries at Focal Point Gallery
also for the documentation sent because as you know,
Exhibitionist is an audio experience, but it can also be a
visual one if you hop off to YouTube or at Spotify.
(49:58):
A very special thanks to Harun Maza for his patience, for his
generosity and his trust. Final mention to the whole team
that Haroon Maza gathered, I highly recommend Googling
Radical Ethics, which is the project that Inesh Kosta
(50:19):
referred to in the beginning of the episode, where you can learn
a lot about the innovative and quite radical and pioneering
projects that took place in the county, the most misunderstood
county of the UKI will put all the other references of the
episode, and there are quite a few in the newsletter, so sign
(50:41):
up. You will always have more
detailed references than in the show's notes.
And in the show's notes, I will give you a few pointers to what
has been mentioned in the episode, of course, because
there's really exciting stuff inthere.
But sign up for the newsletter, follow us on Instagram.
Tell us what you think about this new format and until the
(51:02):
next one, take care, visit exhibitions, be present and stay
Exhibition Mr. Until next time, bye bye.
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