My new work Definite/Indefinite is premiering at Catalyst Arts Members’ show this week. Definite/Indefinite is an experiment that harnesses viewers’ internal reading voice (IRV) to create sound art with no directly transmitted audio. Some 20% of people report having no IRV– so for them it’s a visual work. The viewer is presented with a randomly updating grid of cells of text comprising definite and indefinite articles from various languages. These grammatical particles have no independent meaning, but rather indicate the gender, number and, in some languages, grammatical case of a noun. So, these words have a sound when spoken (or read), but do not signify anything else in a linguistic sense when separated from the rest of the grammar. The sound is then purely referential in that it is contingent on the learned or assumed pronunciation of the letter combinations displayed. The piece thus becomes a constantly morphing Dadaist poem heard only in the head of the observer.
Opening Event : Thursday 06 August 2026 at 6 pm
Location: Catalyst Arts, 6 Joy’s Entry, Belfast BT1 4DR
Link: https://www.catalystarts.org.uk/open-call