This was one of my first experiments with interactive sculpture; I was interested in the ways we find meaning and humanity within the noise and apparent randomness of being alive. Sometimes called “pareidolia,” this tendency to find meaning in the world around us (like seeing animals in clouds, or divinities in toast) is often reduced to a kind of mistake, or pathology. But I think there’s something more to it, I think it’s a deep, ancient tool we have to connect with our environment and the forces that shape it.

I wanted to honor that deeper sense, so I recorded a catalog of myself speaking each individual english phoneme – the basic unit of sound in a language – and built a kind of automaton to “speak” using those recordings.

Because one focus of this piece was a kind of passivity, a receptive openness to what surrounds, I wanted the sculpture not to be directly interactive. There are no visible sensors, no obvious input/output relationships. Instead, it attends to the fluctuations of ambient electrical currents in the air, and to noise levels in the room, and alters its cadence and inflection in response. In that way, it’s a bit shy; if people are talking loudly nearby, it quiets down until it is once again the only speaker.