Lastly, I state my impressions of when I visited an open studio of Takumi Endou staying in Tesla, which was open to public as a related project of Transmediale06.

Takumi Endou is now working for a project called “Phonethica” which is acknowledged by IPA Exploratory Software Project. The followings are what the project is trying to.

A scene in the open studio

There is a French word “Ca va?”, for example. It means “How are you?” that is one of greetings. On the other hand, the same sound “SABA” in Japanese indicates a mackerel fish. Takumi himself said he had a strange feeling to the French conversation “Ca va?” “Tres bien!” when he visited France at the first time.

He worked out the system taking this experience as a hint. What if we could visually command a view of the resemblance of world’s languages. For instance, the same sound “SABA” means “an owl” in Russian, “a log” in Indonesian. This is an image of organizing a systematic network of such words on a screen.

Screen of Phonethica

“For example, what if a girl named “MIKA” looks for the resembling word of her name in this system, and finds out it means “the sun” in small tribal people in Africa, of which she has never even heared? She would think of their lives far away in a broad savanna… Like this, it might be interesting if this system will be able to give such an opportunity that had never been existed.” said Takumi Endo.

However, he is facing various problems for the development. For example, it is said that there are 6000 kinds of languages in the world, but only a handful of these can be statistically collected. How to find out the resembling word groups is also one of the problems. Although it is not as a complete solution, they are planning to use the Internet for the final database.

Installation sketch and Prototype

In addition to the demonstration of “Phonethica” as a software to put the above ideas into practice, they are producing the prototype of Phonethica’s installation in collaboration with Martin Riches and Kazuyasu Kochi, and the scence of development was open to public.

The actual installation will be a huge circular wall, and the appreciators will stand in the center. Then, they can hear various words from a direction where the word are spoken, that is the plan. Here they were producing the prototype under the command of Martin.

A model of a voacalizing part which became a hint of the installation

The vocalizing part is actualized in a very analog method. To begin with, it is a structure applying the principles of the Edison’s phonograph. This was the suggestion Takumi had, towards the lack of materials in current media art. His original point of view was in the pleasure to be able to recognize the sound itself as a material. Moreover, Kazuyasu Kochi was investigating how to realize the structure with Martin Riches’s sketch.

The role and the working contents of Takumi Endo is not really different from leaders for general development projects, but the suggested vision and the result in the future are novel and artistic. Therefore, the existence like him is also recognized as artists. I felt an expanse of the field called art here.

Transmediale 06
Date: February 3rd – 7th , 2006
Venue: Haus der kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
https://www.transmediale.de