AIELSON: The Time of Man

My residency (part of Google's Artists + Machine Intelligence program) consisted of studying the Quipu and reviewing the possibilities of Machine Learning for furthering its comprehension. I wanted Quipus to talk again. But, for that, I needed a voice, but not any voice: one that would come from beyond life, from the afterlife that audiovisual media facilitates when it allows the leaving of sound or video recordings of people that already passed away for posterity, in a way living forever embedded in memory, while belonging to another history.

In the text included below, Eielson speaks of a “doll that will be fed with the most important poetry in the world” and that “will continually recite through the doll's mouth the most beautiful poems conceived by man.”

Using a Generative pre-trained model retrained to Spanish poetry and finetuned to the poetry of Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Cecilia Vicuña, and myself, yet first the model was trained with large amouns of poetry in Spanish.

I was intrigued by the possibility of picking up the stylistic qualities of speech that could be recognized as characteristic of the South American region. I chose the data for the finetunning based on common things among the artists and myself: as sharing an Andean origin, an interest in visual arts, sound, and poetry, but, most importantly, the appreciation for Quipus, referencing, as well, an alternative history of art and technology. As I was investigating voice and accent, a deep Learning system consisting of the Tacotron 2 + Waveglow speech synthesis pair was trained, first, with Argentinean speech + text, and then with the voice of Jorge Eduardo Eielson, in a way, bringing him back from the dead.

The generated voice is not particularly modulated nor clean, unlike what we are used to by now as synthetic voices tend to pronounce understandable phrases: not all the words are intelligible, something that, for our ears trained in the linguistic perfection of the machines, feels familiar and human. This sound art poems are not intended to be passed as if they were his, on the contrary –this is presented as a third entity, “Aielson” that does speak like an old Peruvian man with a Peruvian accent (although sometimes dilucidating its originally Argentinean background) in a way, fusioning Latin America in a male voice.

The story of the Voyager 1 probe is known, sending an easy-to-play disc into space in 1977, with a recording of human voices greeting in 55 different languages, targed to a space and / or future culture. I here I do something similar: wanting to move away from the digital, I decided (at this point, already fully aware of the connection with the “Horrifying Sculpture” and working based on this) to go back to an analog format, that is, vinyl: to turn electric impulses onto grooves grazed into a plastic surface so, like the hand that once counted the Quipu's threads and knots by contact with it, the needle will brush the curves of the vinyl to reproduce sound. Just as ceramics was once the main material used by inhabitants of these lands, nowadays, undoubtedly, is plastic: we can imagine future intelligent life forms finding abundance of plastic "huacos" from our time, one of this being the album entitled “El Tiempo Del Hombre” (In the Time of Men, one of the verses that the Aielson system came up with). Having an analog support will allow a rather easy reproduction of its contents, which will appear as an old man from the early 21st century reciting poetry in Spanish.

"These sculptures are intended, first, to be invisible, since they are underground; second, they can never be built: they have been studied so that they can never be made. The one in Lima is an electronic doll, with ramifications on all sides, that does nothing but repeat and accumulate all the memory of universal poetry. Once it's done, which will happen in 2010 will explode. The result will therefore be catastrophic. I have called it 'Horrifying Sculpture".

Jorge Eduardo Eielson, 1987-8 The text (instructions) he wrote for this piece that was never made is the following: "Horrifying sculpture” 1967

Working only 27 minutes each night (I was not present until the last 6 months of the operation when I arrived in the city carrying my terrifying invention disassembled into an apparently unimportant thousand pieces) it took more than two and a half years or exactly 915 nights from the strenuous efforts of my closest collaborators to place the following object 17 meters from the surface:

1.materials:

a) a compound based on synthetic medullary liquid used as an (field) electronic and placed inside the sculpture a way of vital fluid

b) a methane gas pipeline coming from the city

c) a complete television circuit between the (eye) of the sculpture and the outside world

d) thousands of screws nuts hooks hinges etc

e) a winchester machine gun

f) a talking doll head

g) two adult chimpanzee arms

h) stool

i) a complete radio installation

j) frozen food

k) a 1920 model RCA phonograph megaphone

l) 14 l human blood

m) 15,000 meters of tape recorded with the most important poetic texts of all time including the bible

n) toilet paper

2.operation:

a) The sculpture really has no limits considering its radio system of ultra-short waves

b) Whoever wants to make a copy must take into account two factors of primary importance:

I.-the sculpture regenerates uninterruptedly at the constant speed of 75 grams of matter at the second

II.-its absolutely irreversible residues accumulate at a variable rate from 57 to 65.7 grams of dead matter per second which means a real increase of the object from 18 to 10.3 grams per second with a total volume of growth of 0.10 cube meters per day

c) The sculpture -who will continually recite through the doll's mouth the most beautiful poems conceived by man -he will behave as such, that is, he will satisfy his primordial needs by repeating the same human gestures of food procreation breathing defecation etc although such needs in this case are nothing but an artifice to better recite the poems (rather than a repulsive simulation of the human being -as one might think -sculpture will rather be the result of thousands and thousands of years of civilization)d) Only in very rare occasions, despite his inevitable contact with the outside world, will he seize the machine gun or will he shed a single drop of his precious human blood in defense of a just causee) Possessing a lyrical soul, the creature will emerge many times from the center from the earth and with its furry arms-indispensable in the art of recitation -it will choose a rose or a lily of the fieldf) The creature will explode with frightful results the same day that it finishes reciting all the poems recorded on the magnetic tape."