ALTeks: NGLitcholalia. Sound as Search Engine

How do we craft an algorithmic process with our own bodies? Or process space through variations on how we speak and embody words? How can we understand knowledge-making as a technology, rooted in crafting and glitching words, sounds, and bodies?

»Algorithmic Poetry.« web resident Sherese Francis takes her inspiration from her Afro-Caribbean heritage, and Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, to continue her research on concepts of knowledge-making trough a Black and Afro-diasporic lens, this time producing a radio broadcast, thinking of sound as a search engine to create communication and community.

Sherese Francis, New York/USA — Jul 13, 2023

During the past year, Sherese Francis has been working on a poetic project called KwaNTum, in which she thinks about concepts of knowledge and knowledge-making through a Black, Afro-diasporic lens. Francis developed these ideas in her ReVer(b)sions Lab in which she thought about knowledge-making through language, words, and sounds, developing her own theory of resonance.

»ALTeks: NGLitcholalia (ALTeks as a fusion of altar, alter, and the root of text and technology and NGLitcholalia as a fusion of English, angel, angle, ngolo, glitch, and glossolalia) is a continuation of this process in which I think of sound as a search engine, processing and crafting space through variations on how we speak and embody words, and call and responses gathered together to create communication. We craft the world through a communicative process of random relations and interconnection. For the web residency »Algorithmic Poetry.«, I will do a series of poetic radio broadcasts in which I meditate on a (key)word and then ask others to respond with their own »call ins« about the word, too, in order to gather a community, crafting an algorithmic process with our own bodies and offerings of ourselves around the call of a (key)word.«

ALTeks: NGLitcholalia. Sound as Search Engine will be presented as an interactive webpage where the embedded sound recordings would be interconnected in a web-like formation to reference one of Francis’s pieces in the ALTeks series, where she included the West African spider trickster, Anansi. On the webpage, others are invited to upload their own sounds and other types of media responses to the recordings onto this web.

The website you are about to access is an artistic work within the online program “Web Residencies by Akademie Schloss Solitude”. © 2023. Akademie Schloss Solitude – Stiftung des öffentlichen Rechts, Stuttgart and the artist(s). Technical support by Grayson Earle