Following on from my initial concepts of the creation of devices/ prosthetics to extend the voice beyond sound and beyond the body I conducted an experiment of the first visual aspects I had whilst reading Brandon LaBelle’s writing on the mouth. Taking this as a movement from the depths of the body to the surface of the skin in an action of stretching, I transformed this into physical bands that replace the biological structures of the mouth. The bands work to take the voice from inside the body into the outside environment and back again. This on first view has a horrific and invasive effect, working to highlight the intensity of the voice on the body and show those intensities we do not notice. Taking this further I took inspiration from Shaviro’s writing on sentience and the idea that instead of waiting for a stimulus in order to produce action, sentient beings reach out into the environment to probe it with spontaneous actions to then evaluate the sensory feedback. From this I explored how cephalopods use a tentacle device to explore their environment, initially these experiments are spontaneous reactions to these concepts and utilise both a transformed idea of an artery/ biological messaging tool to take the voice through the body and out to the environment and a tentacle device that can reach out and explore. Both these again have a comfortable effect and, when combined with textures you wouldn’t expect, begin to expand the human beyond the limits of the body and in turn expand the voice beyond sound. Texturing here consisted of giving the synthetics a glossy finish with colours grounded in the biological, but subverted through the shiny plasticity of the finish. Further experimentation needs to be done here to move away from the clear biological structuring of the face and the merging of it with the synthetic mouth.

This experiment also allowed me to explore aspects of blender which were new to me, for the tentacles I used an armature that when combined with a bezier curve allowed me to manipulate the shape and positioning of it. This worked to bring in the fleshy, viscous aspects of the synthetics as derived from the mouth.