Dreamlike encounters with natural materials proliferate in Roote Wordes, an exhibition of new work by Rob Rhee. Inspired by animist texts and experiences, this exhibition works with language as an emergent phenomenon. It explores the influence of “gestures, sounds, and rhythms besides those of our single species” on human speech and attends to the idea that our “language ‘belong(s)’ to the animate landscape as much as it ‘belongs’ to ourselves.i

As alluded to in the title, Roote Wordes wonders about the boundaries of language and communication; what kinds of reciprocity are borne between plants, animals, people, minerals, forces? What acknowledgement is required for a root, let alone an invasive species of root, to speak? The prelude to these questions is two years spent compulsively salvaging “Himalayan Giant” blackberry roots from forestry piles in a Seattle city park. The theories explored in this exhibition address time spent by the artist stuffing his pockets with ornery votives, knobby calligraphy, subterranean humours, mandrakes and homunculi. Only lightly altered, these natural forms turned sculptures, Li, consider transmission to be the essential creative act.

Repositories of action and reaction, blackberry roots shoot and curl in retrospect inclined by absent forces. They are arranged in Roote Wordes in dioramas akin to the wildlife habitat displays of natural history museums and are similarly frozen in moments of invitation and ambiguous regard. These dioramas imagine a nearby world, an animate landscape clicking and turning with language.

Rhee’s poem Beringia, an in-progress text that will be written and rewritten over the course of the exhibition, is expressed in foam on the outer walls of the gallery. A reinterpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s dream vision poem Parliament of the Fowls (in which Chaucer ‘observes’ the workings of a personified Nature), Beringia imagines an encounter between Rhee and a personified Figure of (S)peech.ii The poem takes place in the underwater subcontinent and theoretical land bridge between Asia and the Americas known as Beringia and builds upon medieval tropes of Nature as a fantasized origin and point of return. Two marooned sculptures, Dispelling Obsession and Explaining Ghosts, also share Beringia as a source. They are installed in the passageways between the inner and outer walls.

In concert with the dioramas and allegorical poem, an artificial network trained on the blackberry roots is used to generate an animation entitled present world lyves space. A slowly slurring articulation, present world lyves space intertwines the scholastic and the surreal. iii The neural network’s technical activity of stochastic representation is used for its capacity to produce hiccups and swerves. Embedded and not to scale these random samples mix with faith in complex systems to become mondegreens, or generative garbling.

States near consciousness, such as dreams, visions, projections and hallucinations parallel this process. They recur as forms of transmissible receptivity that give rise to the reciprocity of language. Roote Wordes tracks this exchange, between bodies (broadly conceived) and the worlds they inhabit, catalyze, conserve and befoul.

iThis quote comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and was referenced in David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. The artist drew significant inspiration from both books in preparing this exhibition.

ii Kellie Robertson’s Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy renewed the artist’s interest in allegorical poetry and personification as a creative strategy and drew his attention to Chaucer’s Parliament of the Fowls as a work worthy of broader contemporary consideration.

iiiIn the current technological moment personification has a new object—the human being. Machine learning algorithms once tested and trained to recognize and classify human handwriting now produce writing themselves—challenging a long-standing bulwark of human exceptionalism and self-identification. The bouncing human voice can be felt again for its sense of searching and existential crisis.

The artificial neural network and animation entitled present world lyves space were created in collaboration with scientist Alison Duffy using a Variational Autoencoder.