“The enlightened proletariat’s chip on the shoulder. Reading without recourse to talk it over.

Tripping over pronunciations.

Leitmotif, Nihilist, Epitome.”

— Ronnie Angel Pope

Leitmotif, Nihilist, Epitome lives between the inner and outer life of language, where the fabric of identity would be shaped by singular words. Created in collaboration with machine intelligence, a persona is birthed from the text of Ronnie Angel Pope’s verse. The installation pairs a silent AI-generated narrator with its emergent speech organs — synthetic mouths frozen in the first murmur of the last three words of the poem. Together, the pieces magnify the word defined in isolation, the anatomy it would shape, and the distance rendered between the read and the tell.

Through a mediation between data and matter, the work examines the social codifications that would separate the unspoken from the perceived, the external from the internal, the human from the other. And in the absence of translation between objective definition and subjective experience — the artist would ask, ‘what is lost’?