LAMENT FOR UR
Assemblages from the city that is no more
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LAMENT FOR URIM O city, the lament is bitter, Mourning in a language isolate no one remembers how to speak, separated from our 21st century collective traumas by the unfathomable abyss of 4 millennia.
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PROJECT CO-AUTHORS:
Ewa Trębacz - composer & media artist
Anna Niedźwiedź - singer & cultural anthropologist
Ongoing project based on decoding of an ancient text through creative interpretation, machine learning, spatial manipulation and transcoding between various media.
A lament is a specific poetic form expressing feelings of grief and mourning. The five ancient Sumerian city laments are associated with the destruction of these cities by war. We chose one of them - Lamentation over the City of Ur (ca. 2000 BC) - as the foundation of our project. The lamentation is performed by a female voice - a tutelary goddess Ningal weeping for her city she was not able to protect from the destructive "storm".
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.
Anna Niedźwiedź is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of the body and space, and the study of religion and rituals, including mourning rituals as performative events. 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.
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.
DECODING ANCIENT VOICES THROUGH MODERN TOOLS
ASSEMBLAGES 1 & 3: soundscape, 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:
OUTPUT:
- iterations of ambisonic soundscapes combining all of the above
- elements of such soundscapes can be potentially re-arranged in real time during live performances
TRANSCODING: creating bridges between media
Data flow:
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.
ASSEMBLAGE 2: video + soundscape (binaural audio)
Future directions:
- 3D models or depth maps created in the process above will be transformed into audioreactive point clouds. Such visual environemnts can be then controlled by spatialized sound images and/or by live performance, closing the transcoding chain.
Video software: Blender, TouchDesigner, AfterEffects, Runway ML
OUTPUT:
Multiplatform approach, including options such as:
- VR experience with multiple "chambers"
- Live performance creating interactive connections between media layers
- Audiovisual fixed-media work with Higher Order Ambisonic sound and high resolution video
SOUND IN THE RITUALS OF PASSAGE
| 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. |
On that day, I did not abandon my city, I did not forsake my land. |
[Source: ETCSL, University of Oxford ]
The Sumerian literary text that is the basis of our project represents a genre of city lament, characteristic of the era of the end of an existing order, a time of riots and wars, and a substantial change in population. It is a literary form that emerged around the time of the fall of the Sumerian city-states and is the oldest known textual form of human expression in such dramatic times.
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.
We chose a text that could symbolize the human condition in a special moment - a fundamental change, a small end of the world, and at the same time through the ritual of farewell, mourning, it seems to indicate the way out, transition, transformation.
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.
We are attempting to create series of assemblages - starting from the to original text, through the search for meanings of words that seem universal, to evoke the distant past to which we have no direct access.
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 the process of making sound recordings, each moment is unique, and the result depends on a complex network of factors. These include the interaction between the artist and the surrounding space, the acoustic conditions of which are determined by specific physical characteristics at a given moment.
In our project, we are looking for moments in which, on an emotional level, we will be able to connect with the space here and now, evoked at the same time by words spoken by someone 4,000 years ago.
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