1. A robot must establish its identity as a robot.
synesthesia
frozen sounds
In itself the two-decade history of the existence of net art and computer generated art
aethetics can be seen as legitimization of the practice. Isak Asimov introduces the Rules
of Robotics, and one of them suggests: «A robot must establish its identity as a robot».
Applied to robotic poetry, this statement proves the necessity and virtue of the
manifestation of its mechanic nature. Machine Libertines by the implementation of
synthesized MacOs voice and machine translation methods stress the instability of the
transformational nature of the video poetry and media art in general.
Various forms of computational linguistics and various forms of electronic literature have
been aiming to create an algorhithm capable of immitating natural human language. The
highest Turing test approval for a chatterbot would be impossibility to tell this program
from a real person. And therefore, poetry and story generators are often critisized as
artificial and in need of further «humanization»
The ghostliness of disembodied voice
Embodiment alterity and signification
How do voices relate to body and subjectivity
Marshall Mcluhan approaches the voice as a medium, and as such, an extension of
man.
Gregory Whitehead figured radiophonic space as a sort of zombie space, a dead
space of disembodied voices
Brandon LaBelle Raw Orality
The encorporation of electronics, machinic oralities, and the analogical doubling of
the self come to radically infuse the work of sound poetry with performative energy,
echoing the avant-garde fascination with the phantasmic, ghostly potentialities of
radiophony th leave the material plane
The ability to recreate the human body as an artificial mechanism appears as
onthological subtext throughout modernity, prefigured in the haunting tale of Dr.
Frankenstein, whose creation turns into a monstrous inhuman body, and further
contorted in a variety of surrealist practices and works, such as Hans Bellmer’s
disjointed doll construction.

2. P161 These predigital voicing hint at displacement and ultimate networked
condition of the human subject, rerouting the expressive self thtough an alterity that
turns one’s own body into a speaking machine.
Voice recognition and voice activation programs rely upon our own sense of
displacement and duplication, in which the demands of interacting with voices of
unknown origin, or placing our own into various media, is an everyday experience.
Homer Dudley “Voder” 1939
1961 Max Mattews rendered the song “Daisy Bell” has led to the implementation of
computerized voice programming to appear within a variety of electronic
appliances, vehicles, and other networked systems. With the advent of computer
technologies, the synthetic voice brings a twist tot the poetical by introducing a
voice that has no origin in a given body: the disembodied radiophonic, and
electronically manipulated voice is emptied of psychology, spirit, or granularity.
Aphex Twin “Funny Little Man”
Leaving both life and death beyond, the synthetic voice is digital shadow no longer a
ghost without a name but a signal circulating among everyday experiences
Goldie Vicky reading Shadow definition 1997
From ATM machines to voice activated messager services, the digital synthetic voice
is enabling audio technology to have further impact on the already vague
provenance of the disembodied voice.
P162 The copy and paste culture of postmodern hears the electronically
manipulated voice as one but many already existing within the everyday landscape,
where the synthetic voice hovers upon every bus or train, inside each machine or
telephone call, as one but a series of informational signals that already sounds
misplaced, unsettled, and machinic.
P163 The computer system is a form of alien mind having to interface with the
material world, resulting in an associative language that gives voice to another form
of subjectivity, for the computer is not simply randomly selecting phrases to
produce the jumbled mess of words, but rather actively seeking to impart meaning –
the object’s name - and in doing so, as artist suggests, gives a picture of an
expressive state of mind.
Air “How does it make you feel”
Radiohead “Fitter Happier”