Signal to Noise

How do we make space for ourselves in a system that's incredibly good at holding us?

Tim Etchells in conversation with Nathalie Hartjes

“Okay. Guy goes to a doctor. He says, I’m worried. I’m worried. I’m worried my whole life isn’t real, you know? And the doctor says, Runtime processing error. Flush cache. There may have been a problem with the transmission protocol...”

Are we listening to a doctor replaced by sentient technology or ChatGPT trying to articulate a joke? In Signal to Noise, Forced Entertainment unloads a cascade of seemingly absurd, sometimes unhinged, overall disorienting dialogue on its audience. Amidst an abundance of costume racks, chairs, tables, and indoor plants six performers struggle to inhabit voices hovering through space. Just prior to premiering at PACT Zollverein, FE’s artistic director Tim Etchells discloses a few of the ideas and concerns underlying the piece that also marks the company’s 40th anniversary.

The edges of human expression

“What you're watching in the piece is human bodies in a dialogue with, perhaps in service of non-human voices. The performers, actual human beings, are trying to put their bodies in line with and voicing these speakers who are not human.” The dense and repetitive dialogue may sound mechanical, the lines pronounced turn out to be humanly produced by Etchells himself. “The dialogue comes from materials I've gathered, fragments I’ve overheard, things from books, movies, but it also includes my own writing. I'm writing very complicated, knotty, loopy kind of sentences, with a lot of casual repetition. It's interesting to me how text-to-speech software deals with that, or actually can’t deal with that.”

“I've always been interested in the edges of human expression as it meets something mechanical, and have been drawn to systematic, experimental writing practices. The idea of repetition as a vehicle for going deeper into and finding the edges of a material is big within Forced Entertainment. A way to really zoom in on the material that you start with. As a writer I’m always suspicious of the idea that what you write is entirely your own self-expression – I’ve always been drawn to cut-ups, to quotation, to writing that uses rules; it’s one way to address the machinery of language, which is already a system, already a technology.”

Pseudo human

The nonhuman voices we hear speak slowly, often slurring their words, giving the impression that they are considering in real time what their next articulation may be. They sound somewhat insecure, even contemplative. “In some ways these text-to-speech softwares are quite convincing in producing voices, but you can also tell there's something wrong. It’s almost human, but not quite. Well, I guess they're originally human voices, sampled, compiled into a big data set, and then algorithmically recalibrated to reproduce pseudo human speech. The process opens this whole rather odd psychological space, because the voices have the semblance of human emotional and psychological inhabitation, but they don't have the energies or breath qualities that human voices have.”

“We are increasingly surrounded by pseudo human articulation, which is not in fact human articulation, but a weird recycling of it – voices, images, texts, videos. It’s not so straightforward anymore to decipher if what we hear or see is real. The easy availability of these technologies is changing the ground we're standing on pretty fast. The value of things gets harder to judge, doesn't it? Because we, politically, value the veracity of people's testimony, the reality of people's articulation and their opinions. If voices can articulate with seeming complex psychology and appear to have some grain of emotional truth, it rocks the ground you're standing on. The performance stands on this very unsteady ground. We are trying to negotiate what it might be to be human beings in relation to this slightly odd, nonhuman material. At least at the level of the performances.”

The body imagined

“When you separate the voice from the body as we do in the piece, it introduces something fundamentally uncanny. Voice is not just an acoustic layer. Voice is movement, voice is breath. When you speak, you move, it’s a matter of muscles and breath – it’s, deeply, deeply embodied.” Etchells cites theatre academic Stephen Connor when he says, “that recorded voices always produce an imaginary body, a vocalic body. For instance, that a close mic-recording of Frank Sinatra would produce a voice bigger than human. In this piece the performers are trying to fit in the frame of these nonexistant voices, often in playful and incredibly misguided ways. But they are also bending and transforming the voices by challenging their expression in particular physical ways – the gestures don’t match the voices, with comic effect. There is playfulness and subversion at the heart of the performance, with many wigs and preposterous costume changes.”

Always emerging

Etchells characterizes the performance as a stage haunted by figures, or possible events that are flickering into being, and then swept away, like a radio tuning between stations in the old world. “It's fragments and traces – like incomprehensible 10 second videos on YouTube. Things are constantly coming into focus and then disappearing, but are they new things? Are they memories? It’s emerging, but it’s always just emerging, flickering back and forth, sort of electrical.”

“As in many of our recent pieces, there is a sense of trap, of people whose possibilities for free agency are constrained by their environment. But they still have desires and creative possibilities of expression. This piece is more explicitly concerned with technology. What is a human? What is a human in the context of a system, a confining system? We're always one way or other products or even prisoners of the technologies that surround us, as much as we are the authors if them. It's so deeply entangled, isn't it? How do we make space for ourselves in a system that's incredibly good at holding us?”

This interview took place online on the occasion of the performance Signal to Noise on 14 March 2024.

Nathalie Hartjes is a writer, curator and consultant, working mainly within the visual arts realm for a variety of clients such as Metropolis M, Willem de Kooning Academy, Roodkapje (Rotterdam) and Kunstpunt (Groningen).