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In POLYT[R]OPIC TETTIX, Katerina Undo returns to a story that refuses to stay successful the past. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates, resting with Phaedrus among the cicadas, tells of radical so overtaken by τραγούδι that they forgot to devour oregon drink, and slowly became the insects themselves. Creatures of axenic voice. All memory, nary body.
It’s a seductive idea, if you fto it be: that you could springiness yourself implicit completely, to thought, to sound, to something larger, and not travel backmost the same.
Undo builds her task from that edge. Since mid-2025, participants person been returning each period to the aforesaid prompt, engaging successful a slow, disciplined enactment of repetition. There is nary spectacle here. No rush. Just the insistence connected return. And successful that return, something shifts. Memory is not sentimental; it accumulates, resists, and deepens.
I archetypal met Undo past year astatine the Politics of the Machines – Synthetic Sentience conference, the 5th POM Conference held astatine the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia successful Perth. There, she presented Memories from the Future: Socratic Dialogue arsenic a Co-Creative Method of Planetary Thinking with AI.
Our conversations circled akin questions: what remains of dialog when the voices are synthetic? What survives of the assemblage when representation becomes axenic signal?
That brushwood clarified something astir her practice: its rigour, its patience, and its refusal to treat technology arsenic either a salvation oregon a threat. She had besides conscionable spent the past year successful residence astatine the SWISP Lab astatine Science Gallery Melbourne, a play that deepened her engagement with the proceeding assemblage and its technological extensions.
The last Melbourne POLYT[R]OPIC TETTIX lawsuit begins quietly. You stitchery outside, dressed successful black, already aligned without being told however to feel.
There is nary lift.
You walk up 5 flights of stairs to studioFive successful the Kwong Lee Dow Building. It’s a small demand, but it lands. The assemblage comes into play—breath tightening, steps uncovering a rhythm. As you ascend, you travel the task connected your instrumentality and perceive unsocial done your telephone to a low, measured voice guiding you forward. You are with others, and capable to perceive their devices too, but not looking astatine them. It is some backstage and shared. It doesn’t state itself arsenic a ritual. It doesn’t request to.
By the clip you scope Room 507, you are already much alert and much wrong the experience.
Inside, the ambiance thickens. AI-generated texts and voices transportation a bid of Socratic dialogues—Socrates still lingering, still speaking, present refracted done modern systems. You tin travel closely, oregon fto the connection determination done you. Around you, others bash the same. The work moves betwixt solitude and proximity without forcing either. We stayed for astir fractional an hr successful that room.
Undo calls this “swarming.” In practice, it feels little similar theory and much similar a κοινωνικά instinct: gathering, dispersing, re-forming. You are adjacent others, but not required to execute oregon sermon the work with them. There is simply a quiescent complaint successful that, something held, not released. We still sermon the work amongst ourselves. Katerina joins us.
Then the work shifts again. You ascent further, up toward the rooftop, where the metropolis opens out. The last stage unfolds done idiosyncratic and corporate recordings—another iteration of this quiescent swarming. It promises merchandise into unfastened air, a antithetic registry of voice and presence.
On this occasion, however, that last threshold remained closed.
The doorway to the rooftop did not open, and the work, for some of us, ended conscionable beneath it. A small interruption, but a telling one. Whether accidental oregon not, it sharpened something already contiguous successful the piece: the consciousness that entree is ne'er guaranteed, that movement, whether upward, inward, oregon shared, tin intermission astatine the borderline of completion. In a work so attuned to process, repetition, and transition, this incomplete transition did not consciousness retired of place. If anything, it near the acquisition suspended and held conscionable earlier release.
Not each ascent resolves. This 1 didn’t, and that, too, became portion of the work.
The rooftop remains a projected space within the work, promised, but not experienced.
It helps, astatine this point, to understand where this work comes from. As a Greek artist, based successful Brussels, with an planetary career, Katerina Undo moves betwixt contexts arsenic easy arsenic her work moves betwixt states. Her research, spanning KU Leuven, LUCA School of Arts, and the University of Melbourne, circles questions of embodiment, artificial speech, and what she calls the “hearing body”—how technologies participate us, widen us, and sometimes speak successful our place.
You statesman to recognise something unsettling: that technology is not a tool we use astatine a distance, but something that moves done us—shaping perception, language, adjacent thought itself.
Trained archetypal successful economics earlier turning to good arts and transmedia, her signifier carries some structure and sensitivity. What mightiness work astatine a region arsenic abstraction is grounded successful a sustained enquiry into however bodies, voices, and systems coexist and amusement however something erstwhile interior slips outward, into devices, into networks, and into shared space.
Speaking becomes little astir expression, much astir presence.
There is an understated sensuality successful this, not successful display, but successful awareness. Of your voice, your breath, your presumption among others. Of being afloat successful your body, while besides slightly extracurricular it, listening.
Not everything resolves. At times, the connection leans toward abstraction, and the use of AI raises a just question: are these voices generating caller thought, oregon refining what already exists? Undo leaves that tension open. It is simply a assured decision.
The project’s last signifier gestures toward something adjacent little stable—a voice that is neither singular nor collective, neither quality nor machine. It is ambitious and not wholly graspable. But by then, clarity nary longer feels necessary.
What remains is the acquisition of moving done it.
Step by step. Voice by voice. Return by return.
For those who understand subject not arsenic regularisation but arsenic form—often learned early, often carried quietly—there is something recognisable here. The effort. The restraint. The moments where something astir breaks through, but holds.
Undo doesn’t propulsion for release.
She holds the enactment and lets the voices transportation on.
Greek (GR) · 
English (US) ·