EWA TRĘBACZ [read like: Eva Trembatch]

THE LAMENT FOR URIM Louvre Museum Source: Dfg13	[ 39-40] O city, the lament is bitter, the lament made for you. Your lament is bitter, o city, the lament made for you.   [ 85-100A] The woman, after she had composed her song for the tearful balaĝ instrument, herself utters softly a lamentation for the silent house: [...] The bitter storm having come to be for me during the day,  I trembled on account of that day but I did not flee before the day's violence. [...] The bitter lament having come to be for me during the night,  I trembled on account of that night but I did not flee before the night's violence.		The awesomeness of this storm, destructive as the flood, truly hangs heavy on me. Because of its existence, in my nightly sleeping place, even in my nightly sleeping place truly there was no peace for me. Nor, because of this debilitating storm, was the quiet of my sleeping place, not even the quiet of my sleeping place, allowed to me. [...]   [ 136-143] On that day, when such a storm had pounded, [...] On that day, when such a storm had been created. When they had pronounced the utter destruction of my city, [...] When they had directed that its people be killed,   On that day I did not abandon my city, I did not forsake my land.
	Source: Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Ebeling, J., Flückiger-Hawker, E., Robson, E., Taylor, J., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998–2006.

 

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PROJECT CO-AUTHORS:   

Ewa Trębacz - composer and media artist

Anna Niedźwiedź - singer, improviser, cultural anthropologist

A collaborative project based on decoding of an ancient text through creative interpretation, machine learning, spatial manipulation and transcoding between various media.
 

In addition to the textual layer, our project focuses on the sensory and spatial dimension of sound and its power co-creating mourning rituals. It is a kind of contemplation on the transience of sounds and their role in the rites of passage related to death, passing, leaving, loss and mourning.

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Anna Niedźwiedź is an etnographer and cultural anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of the body and space, and the study of religion and rituals, including mourning rituals as performative events. She currently works as an Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her ethnographic research focuses primarily on the various ways people live and experience their religions, with particular emphasis on the issue of embodied knowledge, the senses and the anthropology of the body. Experiencing sounds and space, the human voice and its various cultural forms, its relations with rituals are areas where she brings together anthropological research and musical practice. In her artistic projects she explores singing and working with the voice and other sounds that co-create dynamic spatial assemblages. She is also interested in the performative aspects of sacred music in various European traditions, as well as in African religious and ritual soundscapes where she draws on ethnographic research undertaken in Ghana since 2009. Anna Niedźwiedz's voice has been a ubiquitous element of Ewa Trębacz's works for many years - as part of concert performances and electronic immersive soundscapes.

 Photo credit: WARSAW AUTUMN / Grzegorz Mart 

 

ASSEMBLAGES 1 & 3 [ the multimedia layer only, no live performance ]
binaural audio
English translation of selected fragments of the Sumerian text is provided as a reference
[Source: ETCSL, University of Oxford ]

THE PROCESS:

1) Improvisation based on anthropological knowledge of rituals of mourning  and subjective, emotional response to the Sumerian text.

The initial stage of our project includes the realization of sound recordings by Ewa Trębacz with Anna Niedźwiedz (voice, improvisation), in an iterative, multi-layer process of creative exploration of the literary text in its original language. 

2) Text to speech tools: generating speech with variety of modern accents.

3) Machine learning used for fragmentation and rearrangement of the source recordings and generated speech. 

Machine learning is used to create an interactive visual map of sounds with similar spectral characteristics. Applied to selections of text and singing, it results in hybrid transitional forms, moving fluently from sung lamentations to a spoken word, and creating a chorus of voices. 

         Software: FluCoMa w. SuperCollider

4) Spatial manipulation of fragmented sound sources and original recordings using ambisonic techniques.

This is achieved through spatial decomposition of the recorded sound sources, and further manipulation and recomposition of such, leading to unique 3D sound objects. It also includes spatial processing of the previously fragmented sound sources. 

          Software: ATK (The Ambisonic Toolkit)  w. SuperCollider
 

Data flow:

 

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ASSEMBLAGE 2: video + binaural audio
[ the multimedia layer only, no live performance ]

TRANSCODING: creating bridges between media 

Co-autoring with a variety of AI tools:

1) Fine tuned LLM to generate text (so far tested with GPT-2 fine-tuned on all 5 Sumerian City Lamentations, but also historical war treatises, and modern international documents regulating urban warfare). Limited results due to the relatively small datasets. 

2) Image to text: images representing destruction caused by urban warfare from areas affected by 21st century conflicts were used to extract blunt descriptions. Such raw descriptions, deprived of any emotion, were used to co-author short “poetic” forms.

3) Image to image: AI used to generate variations and abstractions of the original images (a collection of photographs from modern war zones scrubbed from the Internet).

Such non-realistic variations or abstractions of the original images are further used as a base for creating 3D images of structures and environments.

Data flow:

 

 

Mourning in a language isolate no one remembers how to speak,
separated from our 21st century collective traumas by the abyss of four millennia.
Poetry emerging in a human-machine hybrid voice.
The ultimate liminal conversation, mediated by machines.

Although we are separated by millennia, in this text we hear a longing for a world that passes, for what is known, despair and mourning for those who have passed away. At the same time, lament becomes a ritual, a specific process of coming out of trauma or mourning, taming an unimaginable tragedy.

The text of a mourning poem from 4,000 years ago seems historically and culturally distant from us, yet we are able to relate to it on a basic emotional level. The Lament mourns the passing of a certain world, a certain known order - it is not the end of the world, but of the world as they knew it. 
 

Rituals of passage related to death, dying, and loss take various forms in different cultures. They consist, for example, of singing, recitation, screaming, loud crying, but also noise, even laughter, rhythmic patterns and intensification of sounds, and on the other hand their passage to ritually maintained silence.

In anthropological approaches to the ritual, its transformative and therapeutic power is emphasized. Particularly important is the physical involvement of the participants, because it is in and through their bodies that the ritual is created and happens. The important role of sounds results from their physicality and materiality, which literally permeates the space and touches the bodies of the participants of the ritual.

Simultaneously sound always evokes transience and unique oneness, it results from the constantly changing arrangement - a temporary assemblage of specific spaces, objects, bodies.
 

 

Assemblages: fluid, accidental, unique moments in time

The concept of assemblage is related to the interpretation of reality through the category of momentarily created and unique systems, which in turn create and generate something new themselves, but basically they are ephemeral, fluid, a bit accidental and unique.

Assemblages are also about going beyond the anthropocentric perception of reality and emphasizing the relationality of people, animals, bodies, space, plants, objects, various matter and its various textures, machines and technologies, etc. It is also an indication of non-discursive, performative and embodied elements of reality, and a turn towards interaction and broadly understood ecology. 

The result is a kind of performance that engages our contemporary bodies and interacts with texts from the past. This performative act is a kind of mourning ritual for the city of Ur, which we somehow create and evoke, simultaneously expressing its non-existence and inaccessibility. Thus, the process of materializing and embodying the text and the ideas that flow from it will take place through the human voice. It is an attempt to reach human emotions - a kind of archeology of the literary text, by embodying and enlivening it with voice and physical interaction with space.

In our project, we are looking for moments in which, on an emotional level, we are able to connect with the space here and now, evoked at the same time by words spoken by someone 4,000 years ago.