BOG BODIES, with paintings and sculptures by Ebb Bayley, 2024 (Horse & Pony gallery, Berlin)

When walking on the bog, the pressure of our feet compresses the lungs of the dead, whose voices emerge in response to our presence. We reconstruct a hyperstitional loop of relation where to be buried is not to be erased, but to enter a circuit of communication between the past and future.

Bog Bodies was a collaborative installation of paintings, sculpture, and immersive sound by Scott Carver and Ebb Bayley. In the subterranean gallery space of Horse & Pony, it imagined a portal and a space out-of-time, giving voice to a choir of bog bodies that mumbled, spoke, and sung to each other in real-time across 20 speaker sculptures distributed the gallery.

Technical

Bog Bodies used a collection of machine learning voice models, artificial synthesized voices, recordings, and a complex layered feedback network to build a slowly unfloading dialog between the imagined voices of a buried bog body choir. Synthesis was realized used custom SuperCollider code and RAVE models.