Rename Real Name

Sound Installation by Emilia Telese & Tim Mark Didymus – Generative Art 2000 Conference, Politecnico di Milano Milano, Italy 2000.12.14 until 2000.12.16

Rename – Real Name is a sound and speech installation that makes use of generative engines to question notions of meaning and semiotic symbols, language and mechanised dialogue. It represents the third part of a speech and sound trilogy of work by Emilia Telese and Tim Mark Didymus, started with Mecha-Voices for Ars Electronica 1999 in Austria and TM, for Werkleitz Multimedia Biennale 2000 in Germany.

Rename-Real Name looks at the communication means of the modern world, fusing futurist concepts of the 1920’s to the digital era of 2000. Speech from poet Marinetti, escapologist Harry Houdini, 1930’s Russian poets and contemporary artists who explore communication issues in their art (Chris Wilcha and his workplace psychosis, Tehching Hsieh with his art life)have been jump-cut in real-time and fed into speech to text software that has been mistrained to create a newly interpreted text. At the same time, industrial noises of today, communication devices and Russolo’s Art of Noises symphonies interfere and merge with the speech input creating an audio context in which age is erased.

Each year Native American tribes in Yucatan ritually rename every entity in the world, in order to meditate on their being and devoid them of any aural and phonetic identity. Rename-Real Name draws inspiration from their questioning of the named world, in which sound is a moveable entity periodically regenerated and filled with everchanging meaning.