Simon M Benedict

Fading in to softly wavering tones, a chalky red surface marked with rivulets and craters of varying size and depth emerges from the darkness. It is moving upward within our window of view, evoking a bodily sense of an almost weightless falling, a movement through space that yet feels like a suspension of time. The tones continue, slowly weaving in pitch and intensity as an underlying vibration to the moving image and words. A machine-like voice, modulated and split into a range of pitches and timbres, embodies a strange polyphony that captivates in its dissonance. This dissonance never fully obscures the main message, enunciated with impassive clarity by the higher-key voice. Sometimes twinned or attenuated, it manages to hold fast, even as a sludgy, distorted form of the voice, rising from the lowest bass register, rhythmically persists in latching onto and thickening certain words and phrases, transmogrifying them with a subtle yet unsettling monstrousness.

The words themselves shine with the brilliance of an optimism as-yet unburdened by any critical recognition or concern for the troubling implications of human expansion into space under late capitalist conditions. Adapting a 1962 speech by then-US President John F Kennedy, Simon M Benedict revisits the race that launched just one very expensive ship, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle in 1969. This speech, widely regarded as one of JFK’s finest, represents the power of sheer political will in the astonishing fulfillment of his 28 billion dollar wish ($280 billion adjusted for inflation) in just 7 years.

Simultaneously couched in metaphors of war (“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in Outer Space as yet. … Its conquest deserves the best of all Mankind.”) and peace (“We have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.”), this doublespeak is perhaps most clearly laid bare when Kennedy declares, “Only if we occupy a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.” It is as if preeminence does not already presuppose the subjugation of all others — the antithesis of true peace, except in an imperialist world.

There is both a bitter and beautiful irony and tension in the artist's approach to these archival materials. As an artist of Indigenous (Abenaki) descent, Benedict knows all too well what the concepts and metaphors of frontiers, exploration, discovery, and manifest destiny represent and inflict on the bodies, cultures, and futures of those who happen to get in the way. Yet the artist refuses an overly simplistic or reductive dismissal. For the speech glimmers, even through such admittedly misguided rhetoric, with that deeply human longing for an inexhaustible freedom. Close listening, rather than wholesale cancellation, is the grounds for hope in ever achieving such freedom, without which humanity as a species is truly lost. Through what may seem at first to be a simple re-enunciating of JFK’s speech (albeit slightly updated in ways that also uncover its broader colonialist aspirations), Benedict effects a compelling double-take that opens up possibilities for a reconsideration of what a lasting peace might actually look like. In re-envisioning another way forward, naturalized relationships between intention v. effect, risk v. reward, and desire v. destruction, can be inverted, changing the game from a zero-sum to a win-win. A game in which the concept of one country’s preeminence as the necessary condition for peace would be revealed for the oxymoron that it is.

Upon hearing Kennedy’s ultra-condensed history of human development, we are reminded of the extraordinary — and unnervingly exponential — nature of our technological advancement as a species. Through this opening sequence it is possible to feel once again a profound sense of wonder, the contraindication to despair. Our inventions have wrought untold violence, war, and dispossession, but also shelter, writing, mobility, and medicine. In this moment we can begin to grasp technology as the tool and process that it encompasses — not as something to blame and fear. These reactionary responses only serve to permit further abnegation of our mutual responsibilities in using technology, to the benefit of those who profit most from its abuse. Freed from the self-fulfilling prophecy that our technologies are preordained to increase power for the few at the expense of the many, we can embrace tech’s concomitant potential to empower the many and not just the few. It is only through such an embrace that the necessary political will (e.g., what could $280 billion achieve today?) can ever be summoned to more effectively call for that version of future, of freedom.

We continue to float and fall as the planet rises before us. Then the voice becomes silent and the surface fades from view. How and whether we will land safely still remains to be seen.

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Originally made 7 years ago, this presentation of Not I {after YouTube closed captioning [after Billie Whitelaw (after Samuel Beckett)]} manifests as a time capsule of sorts, as well as a living test case for communication as it is mediated through various assistive technologies. As an artist who is also a professional captioner and translator (between English and his native French), Benedict is deeply interested in both what is often lost and what may be gained in the approximations we use to bridge our communications with others. In this case, the translations involve a shift in sense as well as syntax, as the impetus for Not I… in its original form was the artist’s interest in how spoken language was being recognized and transcribed at the time by YouTube’s auto-generated captioning feature. Launched for all videos in English by YouTube in 2010, the service was celebrated for providing greater access to d/Deaf audiences as well as to English language learners, but it came with many caveats. Videos with lower quality sound, background noise, and accented speech were known to result in captions that were rife with inaccuracies. Suggesting that “President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions,” YouTube set a rather comedically high bar for reasonable caption quality. (While such technological constraints are of course understandable in regard to those early days of automated speech recognition, it is worth noting that over a decade later, d/Deaf users still report that YouTube’s auto-generated captions remain inaccurate and unreliable.)

By 2014, Benedict was making a practice of watching video with captions on in the course of his artistic research and began to prefer this experience even though he has no hearing difficulties. Over the years he has become attuned to how captioning decisions, a form of translation, can either enhance or detract from a work’s comprehensibility. Recognizing that most video, even at the level of professional-quality television and film production, is often not intended to always come across as clearly as a presidential address, Benedict decided to experiment with the system’s limits using audio from one of the defining examples of speech in tension between intelligibility and its opposite: the 1975 performance by Billie Whitelaw of Samuel Beckett’s short dramatic monologue, Not I (written over 12 days by Beckett in 1972). Whitelaw’s now-classic rendition of the otherwise unnamed Mouth captures the utter self-annihilation that can take hold in the life and mind of the silenced and outcast; upon performing it, bound and sensorially deprived, the actor spoke of recognizing, within the anguished enunciation of the one consigned to an inescapable isolation, her own inner scream — along with the terrifying sensation of falling through space.

What ultimately emerged from the YouTube caption generator is in fact as nonsensical as might be expected, yet also surprisingly funny, perplexing, and sometimes strangely disconcerting. Gauged as a snapshot of what the YouTube AI makes of certain combinations of sounds, the effect can be compared to the kinds of “unconscious” biases that surface in smartphone autocorrect engines, but in the key of Beckett rather than the banal. Benedict transcribed the AI translation, and in a move that returns our focus to the work’s textuality (as opposed to the visuality engendered by the widely seen close-up representation of Whitelaw’s mouth), created a video that is, in effect, all caption. Matching the garbled translation to the urgent cadence of Mouth’s enunciations, the dissonance between what we hear and what we read is thrown into sharp relief, while the gleaming white letters flashing in rapid-fire phrasings on the black void of the video’s background enact a kind of concrete poetics in their formal and functional resemblance to Whitelaw’s shining teeth.

Conversations on how to approach accessibility for this work proved challenging and thus exciting, as the process of thinking through possibilities with the artist, access providers, and members from within community afforded us the opportunity to experiment. Emily Cook (Education and Accessibility Programs Director for Critical Distance), recognized early on that simply providing a transcript of the onscreen text by way of access for blind and partially sighted audiences would not convey the cognitive dissonance that is at the heart of Benedict’s work. Just as re-captioning and synchronizing the actual words spoken by Whitelaw with the faulty AI transcription allows for the counterpoint between the two texts to be conveyed visually for d/Deaf viewers, it was realized that a synchronous rendition of the AI text in sound would provide an analogous experience for blind audiences. Simon M Benedict generously agreed to rework the video in order to produce a version with AI voicing of the faulty translation in tandem with Whitelaw’s original rendition, splitting the audio so that the voices emanate independently of each other from the two sides of a pair of headphones or a set of stereo speakers. In both cases, the access layer is integrated in ways that support, extend, and even further complexify the artwork in translation for d/Deaf and disabled visitors, rather than reduce or simplify the experience for the sake of expediency.

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