Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score

Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score is the proposed project of sound artist and composer Moritz Nahold and artist, writer, and performer Kenneth Constance Loe for the »Algorithmic Poetry« web residency. The project explores ideas and processes that Nahold and Loe embarked on in an earlier collaboration in January 2023 at Hothouse in Singapore, specifically how poetic language written with sound in mind would translate materially, and vice versa.

»We are particularly interested in the slippages and inflections of meaning and on medium-specificity in human-AI translation. Fashioning ourselves as algorithms and working together with AI (text-to-music, chatbots, and so forth), we will approach the residency as a feedback loop: cross-feed our sound works and poetry into different machine-learning models as a means to analyze their sound patterns and intertextual qualities; hand the material over to each other (Subletvis–text, Kenneth–sound); use those insights to rework/generate new material; feed them back into the various models; repeat.«

The goal of Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score is to create a non-exhaustive database of sound and poetic text: words and phrases directly linked/tagged to audio samples, music clips, and soundbites. The final output of the residency will be a poetic score (a long poem where each word triggers a sound sample, crafted from this database). The reader-player will be able to create their own compositions/soundscapes via agentive emotional resonances vis-à-vis word associations.

During the online residency, Nahold and Loe aim to experiment with a largely textual website displaying their poetic score: a long poem, each click of a word/phrase by the reader-player triggers (through jQuery, JavaScript, etc.) a specific sound to play, alongside Easter eggs and hyperlinks.

Moritz Nahold, Vienna/Austria
Web Resident, July – September 2023

Moritz Nahold is a Vienna-based sound artist and composer. He has worked with God’s Entertainment, Simon Mayer, and Peter Kutin, among others. His works have been displayed at Elevate Festival, ImPulsTanz, and CPH Stage. Under his moniker Subletvis, he explores the facets between post-digital pop aesthetics and abstract compositions. His music has been released on Ventil Records, Parken, and Tender Matter.

https://subletvisions.net/

Kenneth Constance Loe, Vienna/Austria, Singapore/Singapore
Web Resident, July – September 2023

Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they)  is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria. They are a cofounder of Monzoom.xyz, an online platform for emergent art practices and alternative education co-organized with Weixin Quek Chong, and soft/WALL/studs, a former collaborative project in Singapore involving several artists, writers, filmmakers, art workers, and researchers. They are also a collaborator of holiday poets society, a Vienna-based poetry collective, and Lazy Library, a queer-feminist open library project in Vienna. His  practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, poetics of hospitality, body memory, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, movement, text, and olfactory objects. They have presented their work in cities including Vienna, Sofia, Yogyakarta, Tallinn, New York, Brussels, and Auckland. Their poetry manuscript sun-dried air was a finalist in the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, and their poetry has recently been published in the anthology New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022).

https://kennethloe.com
https://monzoom.xyz