Chris Wood is an artist whose practice critiques emergent technologies and the shifts they bring to both social practice and ontology. He has exhibited internationally and recently completed a PhD in Media & Art Technology at Queen Mary, University of London.

In this workshop, led by artist Chris Wood, you will clone your own voice to make a digital text-to-speech ‘voice avatar’. This will then be used in combination with short form creative writing exercises to enable our computer voices to speak collectively. The voice offers a tool with which to think through the wider issues about our emerging relationships with AIs. Speaking has become a common means of interaction with AI software and holding a conversation with a synthesised voice is a familiar trope via smartphone and home assistants. At the same time, our human voice is deeply tied to our physical bodies, with different mouth, throat and diaphragm shapes producing different voice pitch and harmonics. When the two intersect and we allow an AI to ‘borrow our voice’, we open a window to think about AI’s embodiment or lack of it. We also begin to think about the hybridity enacted by deep learning systems that are trained on enormous amounts of our personal data. In the workshop we will be using a web-based service called Lyrebird. More information about the system and the company’s terms and conditions are available here: https://lyrebird.ai.