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I recently built a granular NLP software to reanimate the dormant Shetland Norn language. I am a relative of one of the last speakers of Shetland Norn (Davit' Henry o' Guttern who died in 1914). The software consists of 335 different keyword in context based datasets: one word and its collocates -- 5 words on either side. This is an explainable onto-affectually oriented language automaton that reanimates Shetland Norn lifeworlds using corrupted forms of the logics that rendered them dormant and thru language modelling deterritorializes the British empire on its own land. Last month I performed my first two live duets with this software drawing on my background in DIY noise. I am making a voice clone to perform duets with: half me/half acoustic ecology of synthetic "nature" in Britain. The grant would fund my prototyping of FSR based disability adaptive interfaces for modifying how this voice clone performs the language model. My cervical spine is partially compressed etc and this has meant that years ago I had to stop performing/touring due to mobility issues and loss of fine motor control. With the Rhizome grant I could tour again: I would use the money to create PCB prototypes for an FSR based microcontroller, which would send resistance based serial data from large conductive spandex sensors I can perform with/inside of as well as future things like a big transparent conductive topographical map with canal systems and a camera live feeding my performance from below. 

my new software+interface based project willamina willamina willamina willamina performing/sharing the Norn language model project at 16 Collective in Glasgow for Market Gallery's 25th bday party

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design for Force Sensitve Resistor (FSR) interface control panel 

conductive spandex, transluscent topographical geographic survey maps, ice interfaces, etc clip-in to the FSR Input ports above

The FSR based voice cloned situated language model performance interface I'm requesting grant funding for won't only be used for performances of my Norn software. I also recently made language modelling software that re-orates reddit chronic illness/disability threads to destabilize systemic beliefs of medically sanctioned harm



An earlier version of the Norn Software
at Holy Trinity Church, South Kensington, London, CHASE - Religion & Art Co-lab - Goldmsiths/UAL/Essex - 28 May 2025
 

(below is) Some Old [related] Work
 

performing as flubber boiler at international noise conference in 2020 right before the pandemic and before i became as profoundly disabled as i am now, the instrument I am playing is the "Shetland Gue" which is a fabulative historiographic instrument based on oral history and nobody being able to agree what it actually looked like before it was replaced by the fiddle 

spandex interface tests


POLYLACTIC ACID FILAMENT PRINTS OF COMPUTATIONALLY SIMPLIFIED SHETLAND MUSEUM ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHS FROM BEFORE 1950 REFIGURED AS TOPOGRAPHICAL MAPS, FISHING LINE SUSPENSION SYSTEM, LED LIGHTS, COPPER WIRE, & COPPER TAPE  

at GRAVITY HILL, PUSHKIN GALLERY, MA, USA // ANTENNA CLOUD FARM in 2022


fabricated at PRATTSVILLE ART CENTER & RESIDENCY, NY, USA in 2021



 

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theft during the lairdic era 1707-1886 , software and solo show that performs critical historiographic work via computational and textile performance of anonymized records of petty theft by my crofter ancestors and their community members (in green) counterpointed by romantic lairdic poetry from the same era that I have denarrativized via NLP techniques

software that refigures the first 4 years of the first peer reviewed english language journal (The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1665-1669) into triplets choreographed around keywords that anticolonially deconstruct the text

melting Norn rain words

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Foula, where I was born, one of the last places Shetland Norn was spoken

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