Voice+ Speaker Series: Kat Mustatea
Guthman Musical Instrument Competition Finalist Kat Mustatea presents her instrument BodyMouth, a voice/movement instrument that makes use of real-time speech synthesis to enable speaking via the motions of the body as part of the Voice+ Research Lab Speaker Series.
Voice as Worldbuilding: Wearing sensors on the body, a dancer sounds out words phoneme-by-phoneme by enacting specific gestures in sequence—literally, turning the entire body into a mouth. BodyMouth is a form of body augmentation, an eerie discombobulation of speech-making that opens up a wholly new expressive mode of live performance and an excavation of alternate voicings for the voiceless. Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist working at the forefront of live performance and cutting-edge technology. Her experiments with language and new narrative forms enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human in the digital age. Her work has been presented at Ars Electronica Linz, New Images Festival Paris, Stanley Picker Gallery London, New York Live Arts, The Cube at Virginia Tech, among others. Her TED talk about AI as a form of puppetry offers a novel take on the meaning of generative art-making as a form of live performance. Her hybrid digital artistic and literary work, Voidopolis (2023, MIT Press Leonardo), a first-of-its-kind augmented reality book made to disappear, was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize.
Sponsored by the School of Modern Languages and Voice+ Research Lab.
