VOICE GEMS: 1000 YEAR ARCHIVE
W1 Immersive (Basement at Flannels, London)
161-167 Oxford Street
London
W1D 2JP
Pioneering artists and technologists Harry Yeff (Reeps100) and Trung Bao will open a solo show across the interior and exterior of London’s W1 Curates presented by W1 Immersive on Oxford Street, where they will debut VOICE GEMS: 1000 YEAR ARCHIVE, a collection of the Earth’s most unique, remarkable and vulnerable voices that have been preserved as individual gemstones.
The new 400 square metre immersive gallery will present wall-to-wall digital gemstone artworks from a selection of the VOICE GEM archive, as well as a public digital display across the facade’s three floors of bespoke LED screens. The exhibition will explore the preservation of the most remarkable, influential and critically endangered voices, which encapsulates messages of love, death, hope and legacy.
VOICE GEMS is a generative system designed by Harry Yeff (Reeps100) and Trung Bao. The innovative 200,000 particle system harnesses the fingerprint-like features found in the human voice to generate the colours and the form of the digital and physical one-of-a-kind gemstones, to be stored in the 1000 YEAR VOICE GEMS ARCHIVE. They are the first project in the world to produce gemstone artworks generated from human and animal voices.
Contributors to the archive 2021 – 2022 include Ai Weiwei, Dr. Jane Goodall , Will.i.am, Sir Geoff Hurst, Herbert W. Franke, Felipe Pantone, Sougwen Chung, Reggie Watts, Kenny Schachter, Lily Cole, Aitor Throup, Klaus Schwab, Platon, Justin Aversano, Hannah Marshall, Jesse Damiani, Nancy Baker Cahill, Dejha Ti and Ania Catherine and more.
VOICE GEMS will also present a physical lab-grown gem “The Everlasting Memory” for the first time, a collaboration with football legend Sir Geoff Hurst, the first man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final. Hurst´s voice gem is a personal recording, recalling the event. Visitors can listen to the immortalised voices that produced the unique gemstone sculptures via QR codes.
The archive also collects vocal phenomena, expanding to AI synthetic voices and the voices of critically endangered species, and institutional collaborations with The World Economic Forum Messages of Hope collection, Koenig Gallery, Francisco Carolinum Linz, Ben Mirin of National Geographic and The Berggruen Institute.
The very first VOICE GEM was created in 2018 from the laughter between two lovers and was used to replace a traditional diamond engagement ring. The project has begun producing collaborative VOICE GEMS collections, manifesting as large-scale new-media, lab-grown physical pieces, installations, and sculptures. Notably Reeps100 and Trung Bao have produced rare pieces from recordings of loved ones who have passed on.
“VOICE GEMS is a technology-driven project which offers a novel form of digital and spiritual ceremony, with the human voice at its core. The gems we have created contain messages of love, death, hope and legacy. People desire a new way to define these themes and preserve memories, and we are providing them with an opportunity to accomplish this. Following our launch, we received hundreds of messages requesting gems from the voices of loved ones. I believe there is room for future traditions around the data and media we leave behind” – Reeps100
HARRY YEFF
Website – www.reeps100.com
IG – @reepsone
Twitter – @reeps1
TRUNG BAO
IG – @tbaocreate
Twitter – @TBaoCreate
©2022 W1 Curates
Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.
