A crystalline digital form generated from Herbert W. Franke’s recorded voice, created with Harry Yeff and Trung Bao. The work brings together his poetry, interest in natural structures and experimental approach to technology in an 84-second audiovisual composition.
Provenance
Published by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke and ELEMENTUM.ART, 29 March–1 April 2023.
A suspended, irregular crystal appears against black. Its surface is built from many small, reflective facets, with silver-white highlights and passages of blue, cyan and violet. The form suggests a mineral specimen, but its structure was generated from the characteristics of a human voice. Sound is integral to the work: the image accompanies Franke’s reading of his own poetry.
Destination in Uncertainty, or Ziel im Ungewissen, belongs to Astropoeticon, a cycle of sixteen poems Franke wrote in 1979 for a book with images by Andreas Nottebohm. He recorded the poems in 2007, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Their sparse language evokes a journey through space in which technological promise and the possibility of emptiness remain unresolved.
The Voice Gems collaboration began in 2021, after Franke encountered Harry Yeff’s work at the Proof of Art exhibition in Linz. Yeff, also known as Reeps100, and Trung Bao developed a system that translates features of speech into visual structure. Pitch, resonance, harmonics and pace shape 200,000 particle data points in a simulated space. The project’s creators describe the process as involving artificial intelligence; the poetry and recorded voice are Franke’s.
The gemstone imagery had a personal resonance for Franke. His work as a cave researcher and his collection of minerals sustained an interest in how natural structures develop. Here, a voice becomes material for a constructed crystal. The collaboration joins that scientific curiosity to his literary work and to a generative process developed by a younger generation of artists.
EXPANDED.ART published this edition in 2023 in collaboration with the Foundation Herbert W. Franke and ELEMENTUM.ART, accompanying the exhibition Coded Beauty in Berlin. The publisher dates the work 1979/2021, connecting the poems to the beginning of the audiovisual collaboration. The NFT release took place from 29 March to 1 April 2023 and closed at 454 editions.
The collected work is an 84-second video with sound. Its generative method produced the imagery recorded in the film; playback presents a fixed audiovisual sequence.