Modern Usage, a suite of works that uses experiments with AI voice models to speculate on future relations between image and body, voice and consciousness. Areas of exploration include deictic projection and the origins of language; bat echolocation tracking paths; surrealist drawing methods; and sensory deprivation experiments performed by artists.
Each part of the project originates from a screenplay written by Graydon and used to train an AI voice modeling engine developed by the composer Jan St. Werner as a musical instrument. The screenplay presents a dialogue between two figures who try to describe their physical reality in words, and continuously fail. The text draws from many sources including Robert Irwin and James Turrell’s research into sensory deprivation experiences, and the surrealist renderings of Raymond Roussel’s Instructions for 59 Drawings.
Printing the screenplay onto index cards, he made the series of photographs presented here, Modern Usage (an unrealized screenplay), in which he arranges, folds and tears the cards into new hybrids of language, image and three-dimensional form. In an accompanying video work, the text is laid out in script order, becoming a set of on-screen instructions for creating the film in the mind of the reader.
Each part of the project originates from a screenplay written by Graydon and used to train an AI voice modeling engine developed by the composer Jan St. Werner as a musical instrument. The screenplay presents a dialogue between two figures who try to describe their physical reality in words, and continuously fail. The text draws from many sources including Robert Irwin and James Turrell’s research into sensory deprivation experiences, and the surrealist renderings of Raymond Roussel’s Instructions for 59 Drawings.
Printing the screenplay onto index cards, he made the series of photographs presented here, Modern Usage (an unrealized screenplay), in which he arranges, folds and tears the cards into new hybrids of language, image and three-dimensional form. In an accompanying video work, the text is laid out in script order, becoming a set of on-screen instructions for creating the film in the mind of the reader.
Modern Usage
2025
series of photographic prints
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