Vowels Are Connected to the Holes of the Body
(2024)

Excerpt, Vowels Are Connected to the Holes of the Body. Generated audio-visual installation, generative vowel processing algorithm with sound library, 3–channel video, black and white, 8–channel sounds, 8 min.

The historical transformation of non-human agents into objects has turned turtles shells into painting frames and uses ground teeth to decorate chairs. How can these objectified, commodified, anonymized and domesticated bodies take back their agency?

Using vowels as a freed sound, this work by Aram Lee attempts to blend and remove the boundaries in the relation subject/object and the non-human/human. The main video in this presentations is a still life scene from a painting by Willem Kalf rendered in a 3D where the movement of the objects, light, and camera are generated in response to an algorithmic sound. The sound algorithm was designed by Aram and is a 7 vowelled system of her voice in her native language, Korean. The vowels travels the body’s orifices following from the lungs, diaphragm, kidneys, anus, genitals and heart to the inside of objects in the collection of the Museum, to turbulence in the body and so on.

The work title Vowels Are Connected to the Holes of the Body excerpt from An Interview by Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi, translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, from AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DEATH, © 2016 by Kim Hyesoon, © 2018 by Don Mee Choi. Used with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Vowels Are Connected to the Holes of the Body has been comissioned by Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, NL, 2024.