Concept
The white-red-white flag has been the democratic flag of Belarus since 1918. At the same time, in many cultures, red lips are a metaphor for vitality and vigor. Through these two symbolic references, this color code shaped B as a diverse, unified theme that could become a symbol of the people’s life, even though it has been suppressed by extremists from both the left and the right.
In fact, to a curious observer, it becomes obvious that there is a top and a bottom in reality, and that there must be a place for people. We all deserve to be at the top, and for this to become true, we must keep standing up endlessly for what it could be.
Structure
B as in was created from a selection of over a hundred recorded audio-visual micromaterials, ranging from 30 milliseconds to 3 seconds. Every audio material consists of voiced bilabial phonemes, and every visual material is a one-to-one video recording of the same sound. Lydia Krifka-Dobes assisted in labeling phonemes to explore the possibilities of/b/with the help of open-source Python scripts. Through clustering, it becomes possible to create a multidimensional space where phonemes are arranged not by their linguistic categories but by their actual acoustic properties, vocal tract shape, labial articulation, and voicing over time.
As a conscious decision, splitting, one of the earliest possibilities of the analog sound studio, and chroma key of the digital video workstation were used as post-production techniques in this work. For this reason, while the performer’s face was painted green, the materials were recorded.
The creation process of this work was carried out by hand; automation was used for chroma masking of the visual materials and categorising phonemes. This decision was made due to technological limitations in creating something pure and simple.