Oriel Un / Gallery One
Jason&Becky
Where the Lost Language of the Dead Begins
20/09/25 - 25/10/25
Preview: Friday 19th September, 7pm
"Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.”
— Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
In Where the Lost Language of the Dead Begins, Jason&Becky present a generative installation that unfolds in response to presence. It does not speak to you, exactly—but around you, because of you.
A machine generates phrases from fragments. A voice drifts into being - poetic, partial, unplaceable. It seems to know something. It misremembers something else.
The machine responds to your presence, or someone’s at least.
The space shifts: in light, in sound, in tone. Nothing stays still.
Not the air, not the meaning. What is seen changes what is heard and what is heard alters what is felt.
In this installation by Jason&Becky, language is not a tool but a trace.
Generated live, spoken aloud, it forms a bridge between systems, between worlds. Human and artificial, intimate and indifferent.
Where the Lost Language of the Dead Begins invites you to pause inside a moment of not knowing. To listen to a voice that may never have lived, but one that judges your existence none-the-less. Does it speak for you - or in spite of you? Where does it speak from, and what has it learned? This is not a story, but the conditions for one to begin.
Jason&Becky are collaborative artists based in Swansea, South Wales. Working at the intersection of technology, language and embodiment, their immersive installations respond to contemporary social and political conditions through sound, light, interaction and narrative. With a practice rooted in participation and ambiguity, they create spaces that question authorship, control, and communication. Their current work explores the uneasy boundaries between human and machine, presence and absence, high and popular culture - often blurring these categories to provoke reflection on the systems we inhabit.
They have exhibited and undertaken residencies both nationally and internationally, including major presentations in Venice (a month long residency with the CIVIC network at Casa dell’Ospitalità, 2016, supported by Mission Gallery), Colorado (a cultural exchange exhibition, From Here and There, hosted by Elysium Gallery and Colorado State University), China (with University of Wales Trinity Saint David), and Japan (collaborative participatory projects in Tokyo and Kyoto with tactileBOSCH and IAFT). Their work has been supported by Arts Council of Wales, Wales Arts International, and the UK Government Shared Prosperity Fund.
In 2022, Jason&Becky were nominated for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards in Digital Art by acclaimed contemporary installation artist Haroon Mirza.
Special end of exhibition event Saturday 25th October
You may also like the following events from Elysium:
- This Saturday, 30th August, 11:00 am, Art in the Bar: 9to90 in Swansea
- This Saturday, 30th August, 11:00 am, Ian Andrews - Rythmical: The Particles, the Cave, The Brain and the Body in Swansea
- Next Wednesday, 3rd September, 06:00 pm, Life Drawing At The Bar in Swansea
Also check out other
Arts events in Swansea,
Exhibitions in Swansea.
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