Seth Guy

Seth Guy

Seth Guy
Earlid | winter 2017

I’m not entirely absent from the work obviously but I wanted to be more like the composer or the editor … setting up parameters in which the work could be performed by others in my absence, like an operation or score perhaps.

In an extensive online conversation with the sound artist who created The LiteraryMix, we dissect how this narrative engine functions, newly built out of hundreds of fiction excerpts linked thematically by the sounds they describe.

Seth Guy has been storing these into a maze-like archive. He gestures towards the reader’s ears. We, in turn, determine the story that unfurls by following through a thick storehouse of ‘sounds.’ Like any digital text, it’s more jelly fish than vertebral; an invertebrate eludes our grasp.

Speech, audible sound doesn’t linger on a line, a phrase, an idea; if we look up, and around, or inside ourselves – it hurries on.

Here’s a mirror to Guy’s own multi-disciplinary process. Generous with his concepts and approach, the conversation between the London-based artist and Earlid curator evolves around ideas of narrative meaning; authorship; ephemerality; randomness; and why we readers hear so well, transforming an author’s words into sounds in their own minds as they read.