Hearing things
Aaron Williamson (2001)
‘A man has been working in a windowless studio to make performances which nobody sees. After the event, the sounds produced by these performances are fed into speech recognition software. This transforms them into plausible poetry… although they have been translated or composed from audible bangs, wallops, scrapes and sighs.’ – Ian Hunt.
Artist and writer Aaron Williamson, who is profoundly deaf, investigates the language produced by speech recognition software in his distinctly lo-fi performance actions. Fizzing wax, furniture scrapes, fanned air and various other sounds produced by the performances are diverted from the artist’s deafness and converted into text by the hearing computer. Hearing things reflects on this process with a stream of prose poems that accompany the generated texts and the book is profusely illustrated with self-photographed images from the performances.
