Hybrid Lives is a series of works set in a speculative world, or maybe in this one, where everyone lives twice: once with a body and once with a battery.
Part one starts as a fable about a girl who one morning walks past the window of a building she passes every day and doesn't see her reflection. From there it becomes a piece for one voice and its double. The artist's recorded voice and its clone ask each other for small favours, speak languages only one of them has learned, drift out of sync and find each other again.
The sounds our phones make all day – keys, pings, vibrations, a notification mistaken for a seagull – are tuned into a minimal orchestra over a pulse made from her hum. Between the two voices are two kinds of memory: the air, which forgets a sound within seconds, and the cloud, which keeps it.
Point your phone at the speaker and the voices gather as silver dust, then spread around you like small lights, a body for a moment. Some of it falls. Some of it stays.
In Cluj, part one stood outdoors, in the arcade of the Institut français courtyard: one speaker in a window lit blue, and a code beneath it. The code opens the cloud on your phone. The phone listens, finds the moment of the loop it is hearing, and from then on the voices leave the speaker as drops of blue and turquoise light with a red centre, gathering and scattering with the sound. A tap keeps a photograph of what you see, a long press a short film.
