The Word as a Collective Story @festivalfilosofia

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The event, entitled “La parola come racconto collettivo. Conversazione sulla sperimentazione Paesaggio di Voci“, aimed to explore – together with the audience – the results of Paesaggio di Voci (Landscape of Voices): a collective experiment designed by AFOr for festivalfilosofia.

Through a simple webapp, any person attending the festival could participate to the experiment, sharing – in the form of digital textual or audio tracks – their feelings and reflections on the space they crossed and inhabited. Those tracks were then processed and displayed in near real time into an interactive map, offering a portrayal of participants’ perceptions.

During the panel discussion, we engaged with the audience to elaborate on the stories emerging from the map, exploring the intricate relationship between the word and the space (as a union of body, mind, and environment).

The word, as a trace of a vanished ‘here and now’, is both an individual and collective act: it expresses subjective intimacy while contributing to the creation of a temporary linguistic community.

Moreover, when digitalized and shared in the form of data, it can become a testimony, opening itself to new interpretations by a broader audience, who engage with an experience that no longer exists. In this way, it allows memories to emerge and look towards the future.

Continuously inspiring new individuals, the word narrates without defining clear boundaries, never fully revealing the experience that generated it. Even when translated into sequences of bits, it retains an energy that sparks discussions and renegotiates meaning, fostering further sharing.

Unlike extractive data collection methods commonly used on social platforms for sentiment analysis, this project adopted a generative and participatory approach. Participants had the freedom to express themselves or not, contributing to a “linguistic landscape” that offers glimpses into personal perspectives. Here, the data became “voices” that do not claim objectivity or neutrality but are part of a ritual that opens up processes of collective elaboration (in the psychoanalytic sense of Durcharbeitung, or “working through”).

A phrase by Anne Cheng, who delivered a keynote address at the festival, encapsulates this idea: “The meaning lies in the rites even more than in the words.” Beyond the words that emerged on the “Landscape of Voices” map, the very act of generating these voices and gathering around the data to explore meaning together holds value and significance.

This resonates with the main lesson I received working with the artist Salvatore Iaconesi on projects like DataMeditation about the necessity of building new collective rituals where the relationship between humans, non-humans, data, and computation can reveal its expressive and testimonial potential.

In “Landscapes of Voices,” participants were invited to stop for a moment, slow down, and connect both with the sensations arising in their bodies and the words emerging in their minds.

Thanks to AFOr team who invited me to join the panel discussion: Silvia Tagliazucchi, Matteo De Cristofaro, Metella Montanari, Antonio Canovi. “Paesaggio di voci” webapp has been developed by Elia Giacobazzi.