“To execute the word” is an artistic research into the possibilities of language beyond its established limits and its capacity to generate new perceptive realities. With this purpose the word is detached from its qualities as a lexical element (semantics, syntax) in order to free it and reinterpret it from new points of view. This is the origin of the title of the project: to execute the word as it is “killed” as an element of meaning, designation and conventional definition, while at the same time taking the meaning of “execute” as it occurs in programming languages, referring to putting the word into action.

The proposal aims to overcome the boundaries of language, thus going not only beyond translation and the differences between languages but also beyond itself as a closed discipline, creating a sort of “languagge environment” where the identity of words is explored detached from established associations.

The project is built around the idea of poetry as a way of subverting of the established order in the use of words, thus using it as a methodological model through which the research is developed. It assumes the word for the word, language as an autonomous element that creates its own poetic reality, creating an environment of perceptual subversion by changing the rules of the game, by blurring the limits of the elements with which we refer to the world and build it in our mind.

The conception of the word as a triad of phonology/semantics/syntax is abandoned in order to conceive it as an action. Language is processed leading to a new relational level between the word and reality by giving rise to a reality that corresponds directly to the word itself. A reality that is not real but true (“Jamais reél et toujours vrai”, A. Artaud) and is opposed to the mere arbitrary word-world link with which we conventionally designate things.

The research focuses on the interpretation of words as sound, unfolding in three areas: word-music, word-gesture and word-light.

– Word-music is related to the study of prosody and proposes the transcription of words into music through the study of melody and rhythm in speech and its translation to midi in Ableton software.

– Word-gesture investigates the aspect linked to the gesturality of the word as a written element and the sound derived from this writing. Likewise, this sound dimension of the written word allows its retranscription to the musical field. Both word-gesture and word-music open the possibility to a research on the self-contained reality of the word in a sort of feedback loop in which the instruments with which these “musics” obtained from prosody and writing are reproduced would be made from samples of the sound of the designated element. This way, the sound reality of the world is linked with that of the word, creating a new connection between the two that is not based on convention but on poetic physics.

– Word-light focuses on the field of sonification, the luminous reading of the written word as well as the three-dimensional spectrograms of the spoken word to obtain its inherent sound through the visual.

Event in the framework of tekhnē, funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.