Reciter(s) by Po-Hao Chi (C-Lab, Taiwan)

➡️ This presentation is part of IRCAM Forum Workshops Paris / Enghien-les-Bains March 2026

Reciter(s) is a distributed sound performance composed of mobile devices, voice assistants, and algorithmically recomposed texts. Audiences simply open a webpage on their phones to join a collective recitation shaped by diverse synthetic accents and rhythms, transforming the internet's connectivity, synchronization capabilities, and transmission errors into an audible experience.

The work draws inspiration from Cisco's widely recognized 2000 commercial, "Empowering the Internet Generation," in which children of various ethnicities repeatedly asked, "Are you ready?", conveying an optimistic vision of global connectivity and digital empowerment. Today, voice assistants appear to fulfill that borderless promise, but the synthetic voices that once felt novel have become habitual media: embedded, standardized, and teetering on the edge of obsolescence.

The system's architecture routes text through a Max/MSP patch to a cloud server, which distributes fragments via WebSocket to connected browsers. Each device reads the assigned content aloud using its built-in speech engine. As more devices join, differences in hardware, network quality, and vocal character introduce unpredictable shifts in rhythm and alignment. The system foregrounds rather than corrects these deviations: glitches, offsets, and device heterogeneity become performative material.

Reciter(s) brings texts, data, and behavioral traces from cyberspace into physical space through distributed recitation, revealing gaps between technological rationality and sensory experience.