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Voice and Code

Hidden Voices Still Speak The purpose of this text is to provoke thought about the connections between our oral expressions of language (speech and song) and programming languages. I have no intention to deliver a scientific paper. It predominantly is a reflection on what voice is, and how it seems to relate to code. This paper is written based on the assumption that all human creations "say" something about the human condition. There is no technological world separate from our human world, our bodies, and our minds. We have created machines and languages as we have created the crops in our fields. As Gunther Kress puts it, "Any landscape, the communicational included, is the result of human work. 'Human' and therefore full of affect and desire; 'human' and therefore always cultural and social." [1] The things we have created are as much part of us as our thoughts are. The question is, however, how can we stay engaged with our externalized, materialized ideas and not be controlled by them? If we recognize ourselves in our creations, we are less likely to lose control over them. Adrian MacKenzie writes, "The problem is how to engage with a collective’s embodiment of technical mediations without repudiating, or over-identifying with, technology." [2] I believe that reflecting on the human aspect in the languages that control our machines, networks, and systems is one way to achieve this, and I chose the most physical representative of language as an entry point: voice. In art, much of this reflection is performed in a playful manner, by toying with code as if it were some exotic tongue or by simply appropriating it, taking possession of it physically, vocalizing and externalizing what was initially presumed to act as an inner voice of the machine world only.