Tongue, Liberated!

• exhibition catalog
• 2007
• offset lithograph, adhesive bound
• 188 x 180 mm, 120 pp

The exhibition was about the the “speech act,” and the silver circles printed on the right-hand pages represent the voice of Vicki, one of many machine voice personas provided by the Mac OS. Vicki usually introduces herself by remarking, “Isn’t it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?” The circles were derived from a sound waveform of the phrase as it is uttered by Vicki. (Imagine that the pages are arranged along the same time axis used by the waveform; the height of the ave at a given moment is translated into the diameter of the circle on the corresponding page.) In other words, the catalog is also a “recording” of a voice: it should be possible, theoretically, to re-play the speech by converting the circles back into a waveform.