HARRY YEFF Q&A
What role does collaboration play in your creative process?
A lot of my process as a practitioner has been centered around voice. For most of my early life and my 20s, it was really all about “what can my voice achieve”, what is the upper limit of my abilities, how do I find new techniques and how can I feed these ideas back into myself and to my own potential? But then I think I found a higher purpose as an artist when I became much more interested in the collective voice. The concept of a voice as – not my own subjective artistic interest – but an attempt at thinking of voice objectively.
Every human being on earth has a voice, yet some can avoid theirs. Some people are terrified to speak up. Some people don’t think their voices are beautiful. Meeting academics, engineers, thinkers from around the world that think about voice 24/7, I realised that human beings have this remarkable, incredible miracle of engineering, and they can go their whole life without ever really appreciating that. So thinking about how to create experiences and create work that really celebrate voices as a whole was instantly a collaborative experience, because it came much more about bringing voices together, finding new ways of celebrating voice.
One project that’s essential to that is ‘Voice Gems’, which is essentially a large archive of collected voices. And even though these voices don’t always interact with me, it’s very much a collaborative process. Now we have 300 individuals who have shared what’s important to them in life, shared why their voices are important. Even non-humans are sharing their voices, adding to the archive. That’s something I could never have achieved on my own. I think the idea of going beyond your vision of an individual, as soon as you start being more open to collective collaboration, there are much bigger visions [available]. I think, as an artist, that’s a higher artistic purpose, which is something I’m really trying to explore.
I also think that, as an artist playing with the different ways that a voice can be represented, it allows for new behaviours. As soon as you represent something in a new way, it opens up the chance of new habits and new relationships. There are fascinating phenomena [that occur] when someone can’t use their voice in certain ways. One example is that some people feel very uncomfortable raising their voice, and there’s a direct connection between blocks in being able to open your voice and scream and shout, and maybe some difficult experiences you’ve had in your life. The voice is an incredible gateway for not only influencing sound around you, but as a signifier of your sense of self and identity. It’s always such an incredible moment when you see someone open up that’s been scared to [do so] – that’s a huge driver. It definitely changed my path as an artist when I started to think art could do that. I know I’m biased, but voice is just an incredible subject matter.
Why do you think it is so important for diverse voices and experiences to be represented in creative endeavour?
I think it’s more about shifting some narratives. When I was in school and told I was ADD and dyslexic, I was often sent to another room and given a different experience, given a lot of labels. I remember the first time my teacher announced it to the class because she was trying to teach the kids about these non-neurotypical kinds of processes. I thought I had a disease. I thought there was something wrong with me. As a young person being told that, my reaction was “I’m unwell”. It is changing now, but there are still many, many young people with stunning talent and vast potential, who maybe get occasionally distracted in certain subjects, but also have the capacity for hyper-focus. Which means they’re able to zone in on something way above the average person’s capacity. Across all forms of diversity and representation, it’s amazing to create work that allows for young people and adults to see it being celebrated. That non-linear process is not only a very beautiful thing, but the world is now calling towards the need to be able to be adaptive, to move between many disciplines, to think in many different ways.
My neurodivergent tendencies have been a key part in me flourishing as an artist but there have been parts I’ve found difficult – which has often been a certain response to dopamine. Nobody wants to do something they don’t like, right? Boredom exists. Certain individuals have a different response to the fall off of the neurotransmitter that creates motivation and drive. There are different shades of boredom. There is boredom that is a slight discomfort, and there is boredom that has an almost pain-like quality and can trigger the nervous system. There can be a reaction in the body, and it’s very easy to criticise. That ‘fall off’ part is the most talked about aspect.
I’ve found hyper-focus my whole life in different things. At school, it was chess. I played at county level, which allowed me to believe in my thinking. I didn’t feel I was achieving in school, but I was captain of my chess team. I was winning chess tournaments. It was actually my chess teacher who said, “Harry, you can think clearly, you can think for yourself”. That mind-shift actually had a huge influence, and allowed me to do better at school and made me more confident. So, in my work, I’ve always had a non-linear approach. If I’m really interested in a subject and the dopamine is hitting, I will go deep and fast into that. And it was voice that triggered that neurodivergent obsession, which allowed me to find techniques and gain control. I wouldn’t be as bizarre as I am today without those neurodivergent, non-linear explorations.
How is tech influencing your own creativity, both now and in the future?
I was touring globally as a musician and when I stepped away from music performance, I thought maybe this is the end of my creative career. But a couple months later, by chance, I had my first offer to be an artist in research with UCL in the neurology department. I contributed to a series of voice studies because of my unique ability to control voice. I met Sophie Scott, who’s now the director of the neurology department, and she completely changed my life. I saw this world where it was about articulating things that people can’t see. People maybe sometimes think that’s not an artistic thing, but I think art is exploration. Working with academics as an artist allowed me to see and hear things that I couldn’t otherwise.
A natural follow-on to that was when I started to get access to a lot of new technologies as an artist. About a year [after UCL], I went to Harvard University as an artist in research with the phonetics department. There I met CJ Carr, who gave me my first interactions with AI. Being able to generate a synthetic voice reminded me of my chess days, being able to create something that could challenge me. I just saw technology as another way to explore. Since then, I’ve gone on to do a series of art and tech partnerships, with the Max Planck Institute, United Nations and World Economic Forum.
I think that the use of technology in art is a very non-linear way of thinking. You’re trying to find these new connections and neurodivergence tends to be very good at creating value in unknown environments where there isn’t necessarily an obvious path to follow. So that cutting edge part of art and tech is like a perfect storm for finding new use cases for AI, for spatial audio, for performance.
There’s a nuclear bomb-level of disruption that is possible with AI. I think a lot of service-based arts are going to be challenged – but the people that can utilise the tools, fight for their ethical use and really augment it… there’s going to be some incredible art. There’s also going to be something I call a ‘diversity of vision’. A lot of the kids in the environments that I grew up in are going to be able to express their ideas and their visions in a way they just couldn’t have done without this tech.
What creative projects have you got coming up that you’re particularly excited about?
The ‘Voice Gems’ project which, as I mentioned before, is a global voice archive. We’ve been producing physical sculptures from voice for some time, but we’ve found new methods to create lab grown structures. The ability to grow crystalline forms from voice is something that we’re really excited about. It kind of hits home the narrative about the preciousness of voice. When you can celebrate a voice in a new way, when you can create new experiences about voice, it’s really exciting.
There’s a particular Voice Gem that we’ve created from the ‘voice’ of a tree. The ‘Survivor Tree’ was the first thing to grow back after the Hiroshima bomb, and Philip Clemo and a team in Hiroshima went out and recorded, using a hydrophone, the inner workings of this tree. When it absorbs water from the ground and passes through it, it makes all these clicks and pops. So we generated a Voice Gem and that work has been nominated for two Lumen Prize awards. It’s just another example of how this new world of art and tech can highlight stories that should be told.
A schoolteacher said to me many years ago that everything had been done, and I think I’ve dedicated my life to proving that that’s not the case. I do that in the spirit of art providing new ways of experiencing ideas. That goes beyond me, goes beyond beauty. It’s about what is artistic purpose? And that’s something I hope to chip away at for the rest of my life.
Harry will be appearing at Blend Barcelona on 8th November 2024. He is kicking off our Blend Spotlight keynotes with a presentation and performance titled ‘Unlocking Potential: The Collaborative Journey on AI & Self’.
Interview conducted on 23rd September 2024.
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