Your voice is unique. Your voice’s tone, texture, and timbre combine to create the sound of you in the world. You can immediately identify a friend calling from another country, your mother calling you in for dinner, your baby’s cries in the next room from their voices, but they are difficult to describe to another. Voices are intimate and specific. They are also nebulous and ephemeral.

The VOICE GEMS project by REEPS100 (Harry Yeff) and Trung Bao captures this paradox. They use a bespoke generative computational system to translate audial voices into visual works of art. The VOICE GEMS are colorful, digital sculptures that sparkle and shine, accompanied by the speaker’s recorded voice. The project proposes that VOICE GEMS, as synesthetic objects that combine visual and sonic information and generated through human-machine collaborations, express new ways of being in the world by giving form to voice.

To make each Gem, Yeff and Bao deploy AI systems to compose roughly 200,000 data points. Those data points determine the placement and color of each particle you see in the digital sculpture. Yeff likens voices to fingerprints. “Each one is genetically coded, so every human and non-human voice on Earth would produce a unique VOICE GEM,” he says. “Each voice is a special instrument with an idiosyncratic shape. By using generative computer systems, we come to understand sounds’ shapes through pattern-making that go beyond human creativity alone. These systems reveal the cross-modal nature of a voice, helping us meet an essential part of our being.” 

Moving between materials, Yeff and Bao’s project is one of transduction — the process of converting signals across media. Their work recalls that of modern artists in the early 20th century who experimented with cubism. Artists such as George Braque and Pablo Picasso strove to paint the world onto a flat canvas, extruding a figure’s features to give the impression of added dimensionality. In “Portrait of Dora Maar” (1937), Picasso depicted the subject both facing the view and in profile, engaging two perspectives simultaneously. In later works (for instance, “Head of a Woman,” 1962), Picasso represented those torqued figures in paintings (fragmented nose! Too many eyes! Disjointed limbs!) as sculptures. Mapping and then re-mapping human features between dimensionalities created perceptual dissonance for viewers. The tension between Picasso’s living subject, his painterly depiction of Dora Maar’s nose, and the proceeding sculpture of such a painting (unfaithful to how we perceive the world, already in three-dimensions) suggested humans stretch the ways to see.

VOICE GEMS similarly let us glimpse ways to encode new perceptions in the world through transduction. Audio data of a voice propagates through air, to a recording device, through the AI system, to a digital representation. Yeff and Bao are experimenting with transducting the VOICE GEM further, representing them in various media. They can be rendered as NFTs, prints, 3-D prints, large scale projections, and cast sculptures. “Sound is often conceptualized merely as an ephemeral thing, with a smoke-like quality,” Yeff says. “But sound has form and is physical. The voice is both the mind and the body at the same time.” VOICE GEMS are technologies that unite a human’s embodied voice and its molded, externalization through digital media and sculpture. Although “the human voice is amorphous like smoke,” Yeff explained, the project materializes “form and a physical poetry, presenting the ability to hold and freeze in time all vocal phenomena.” 

The VOICE GEMS recall sacred objects of antiquity while proposing novel ways to memorialize future beings, including but not limited to humans. Yeff and Bao are extending their research into other realms, seeking to distill more-than-human worlds, to preserve the memory of perhaps soon-to-be-extinct species in this moment of planetary crisis. They are developing technology so that a VOICE GEM could be transducted in reverse: a silver sculpture could decode its digital voice-print, which could decode its original sound, allowing voices of the past to reemerge. 

VOICE GEMS, despite emergent technologies in nature, explore the possibility to establish new ceremonies in the digital experience through centering the human voice that catalyzes remembrance, love, and hope. There are now over 250 unique, generated VOICE GEMS, edging the project to become one of Earth’s most experimental and eclectic voice and art archive projects.

Each VOICE GEM is numbered, logged, and added to a 1,000-year decentralized archive. The Berggruen Institute commissioned three VOICE GEM that explore the nature of voice, memory, and place.

Future Wunderkammer reimagines the cabinet of curiosity for distant and possible futures — speculative relics from worlds that have not yet come to pass. Explore all three Voice Gems, and more, at Future Wunderkammer → https://futurerelics.berggruen.org/