Echoic Recursion
The installation is always listening. It is always speaking.
"Echoic Recursion" is a distributed sound installation composed of wall-mounted microphones and speakers operating as a continuous relay system. Visitors entering the space trigger chains of fragmented speech. Spoken language is captured, interpreted through AI systems, retransmitted as synthetic voices, and reabsorbed as new input. Because every microphone listens to every speaker, the system continuously consumes its own outputs - producing recursive conversations that drift further from their original meaning over time.
Rather than collapsing into noise, the system persistently attempts coherence. Sentences are misheard, recontextualised, and partially reconstructed as they circulate through the relay. Meaning does not disappear - it drifts, producing speech that is unstable yet still linguistically recognisable. Human language and machine interpretation gradually become inseparable.
Kate Crawford has argued that AI is not "artificial intelligence" but a material system of classification and infrastructure - processes that flatten context, embodiment, memory, and situated knowledge into machinic approximations. "Echoic Recursion" makes that argument audible. Within the relay, language no longer belongs fully to its speaker. Once spoken, it enters an unstable ecology of recursive interpretation - an acoustic monument to what disappears when lived experience encounters digital abstraction.
The installation is constructed from pine and aluminium, housing an embedded network of ESP32 microcontrollers, a Raspberry Pi, amplifiers, microphones, and speakers. Its infrastructure remains deliberately exposed: wiring, delay, signal interference, and feedback are active components of the work rather than concealed technical support. The machine is visible. That is part of the point.
Year: 2026
Materials: Pine, aluminium, electronics
Dimensions HxWxD: 120×120×40 cm
Exhibition: Available for institutional exhibition - enquire via the contact form
