Reading this research essay aims to create an experience of sitting next to the radio receiver while tuning through different radio frequencies. Each section shifts tone and register while circling the same central question: what happens to language when naming is controlled, restricted, or automated by the new speak-machines? The text explores whether risk, failure, and even violence are necessary conditions of human speech, and whether a robot prevented from causing harm can ever truly “speak” or give name to things. Parallel to that, a design question concerns how the essay itself can embody instability through fragmented voice, associative drift in its minimal form.
Both the handwritten essay and the physical installation are built from a shared “archive of affect”, also referred to as “z(i)ettels” which are ultimately a collection of notes, some of them are: memories, references, conversations, interviews, found media, emotionally charged images, all collected throughout research and design practice circa writing the text. Ultimately its the things that the author experienced while writing the text. They function less as citations and more as resonant interference. Secondary sources range from online media sources criticizing AI backed by more feasible data.
The handwritten form of the essay adds layers for interpretation, one of which is its minimal form which paradoxically multiplies friction for machines, yet not for human readers. The research essay explores instability through language and associative reflection, while the installation externalises these questions through embodied listening and proximity. In the work, approaching a modified radio triggers a stream of fabricated news that slowly destabilises, asking the listener to negotiate truth, belonging, and survival through attention and distance.
Methodologically, the project combines reflective writing, interviews, prototyping, sound design, iterative object-making developed through design practice. The essay and installation function as two translations of the same process originating from the same set of points (z(i)ettels), distributing instability across different media rather than resolving it into a single answer.