SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT LANGUAGE

I organised a panel for Soft Centre’s discourse program at Trades Hall in Melbourne. I invited vocalist Sonya Holowell and legal and media scholar James Parker to speak alongside me. We each gave a short presentation. I spoke about the theme for the panel—a critique of the fantasy of the one-to-one relationship between words/sounds/representations and the world.

I gave a few historical examples of this fantasy structured by what could be called an anxiety of the breach between us and our imagined adressee / our words and our imagined world. From Ramon Lull to Giordano Bruno to Large Language Modelling, some pics -> of my slides might help capture the tone and content of the presentation.