In 2008 an American researcher rediscovers the lost traces of the first recorded voice ever: the 148-old voice of a little girl singing the French lullaby Au Clair de la Lune. One year later another researcher experiments with the playback speed and manages to prove that what the fragment actually contains, is the voice of a full-grown man. This exact same lullaby is the song sung by the artificial intelligence HAL in the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. As HAL dies his voice performs precisely the same glissando as the voice of the non-existent girl: a high-strung, insistent voice is gradually slowed down into a deep, sleepy and harmless one. Erik Bünger’s lecture performance takes us on a winding trip through history. A history where the voice of a child echoes forwards and backwards through time, retroactively changing history and changing the present from the vantage point of the past. The more we try to shut her voice out, the more persistent her song becomes.
About the artist
Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, writer and composer, based in Berlin, whose work is based on an extensive research into language, technology and the human voice. His performance lectures and videos have been presented around the world in venues such as The Curitiba Biennial in Brazil, Centre Pompidou in Paris, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, The Wellcome Collection in London, The Rotterdam Film Festival and The Lincoln Center in New York.
