The Voice Gems project brings us back to the theme of memory and its preservation through digital tools. But there are not only the answers provided by technology – record, preserve, etc. – but also those of multimedia art.
Last 8th September, artists Harry Yeff (Reeps100) and Trung Bao inaugurated a solo exhibition inside and outside London’s W1 Curates, presented by W1 Immersive in Oxford Street: Voice Gems: 1000 Yyear Archive, a collection of the Earth’s extraordinary and rare voices that have been preserved as individual gems.
The new 400 square metre immersive gallery presents wall-to-wall digital artworks from the Voice Gems archive, as well as a public digital display on three floors of the façade with LED screens.
Voice Gems is a generative system designed by the two artists that relies on the digital imprint of the human voice to generate the colours and shapes of unique digital and physical ‘gems’. The archive also collects vocal phenomena, extending to synthetic AI voices and animal noises of endangered species, as well as institutional collaborations with, among others, the World Economic Forum’s Messages of Hope collection, National Geographic’s Ben Mirin and the Berggruen Institute. The gems are accessible through an immersive exhibition and QR codes.
“Voice Gems is a technology-driven project that offers a new form of digital and spiritual ‘celebration’. The gems we have created contain messages of love, death, hope and legacy. I believe there is room for new traditions regarding the data and digital traces we leave behind,” said Harry Jeff.
