Back

ALTeks: NGLitcholalia

Sound as Search Engine

Part of my larger poetic project, KwaNTum, in which I think about concepts of knowledge and knowledge-making through a Black, Afro-diasporic lens, ALTeks: NGLitcholalia is a series of poetic radio broadcasts where I meditate on a “keyword” I created. In collaboration with search engines, I break the word down into parts and based on the various potential pronunciations, potential related sonic words, etymologies, and Black, Afro-diasporic musical and socio-cultural-historical sensibilities, I attempt to find results to craft a full speculative meaning for each word. ALTeks, inspired by the speakers Altec Lansing which I used in my assemblage piece, ALTeks: Anansi’s Digitation Time Device, is a fusion of altar, alter, and the root of text and technology; NGLitcholalia is a fusion of English, angel, angle, ngolo, and glitch and glossolalia. In this project, I treat sound as part of the search engine process, processing and crafting a sacred space through deeply meditating on and searching for variations on how we speak and embody words; as calls and responses gathered together to create communication and understanding through the differences and possibilities of expression. We craft the world through a communicative process of random relations and networks of meanings. In the future, I hope to ask others to respond with their own "call-ins" about their relationships to words and languages, too, in order to gather a community, crafting an algorithmic process with our own bodies and offerings of ourselves around the call of keywords.


Click here to visit the project playlist on Spotify