“Les seins comme les marguerites éclosent” is the concluding exhibition of Zoé Tullen’s six-month residency in the Berlin Atelierhaus offered and supported by the Canton of Geneva. The immersive installation presents four paintings and an interactive sound piece. A duet of buzzing sound as an uninterrupted alarm envelops the room, tones evolve through human presence and invisible waves travelling the space. It is made of sculptural antennas connected to analogue DIY systems inspired by the instrument theremin, powered by sunlight. In her painting work as well as in her interactive sculptural lo-fi instruments, Zoé Tullen aims to introduce subjectivity and a singular physical gesture into the technological world. Her work seeks to make visible the interwoven network of different layers and ecosystems from a queer perspective.

Zoé Tullen’s research on the philosophical significance of the Turing test (version A) – which attributes intelligence and potential humanity to machines based on their ability to imitate a woman – led her to work on the unintelligible, abstract textures and primitive humming sounds, holding her breath in the heart of a generator. 

In the essay « Robopoïèse », André Ourednik defines language as the first form of artificial intelligence, a new layer of understanding which extracts the human condition from the unspeakable, the elusive, and the instability of nature. Language first sets a binary vision separating human from its surrounding, which one needs to name and call in order to set boundaries, ownership and power over the other.

There must have been an intermediary state, a short momentum in the evolution of human intelligence when the brain developed enough to recognise and name things but hadn’t invented the language yet. Each surrounding would become a vision, each gesture would become a sign, each sound would become a word, stammering meaningful yet unintelligible waves. Before human could speak human could make noise, murmur a melody to fall asleep, dream of abstract landscapes where the light of the sun, wefts, spiderwebs, neuronal electricity, ants and analogue networks, antennas and bodies would merge into a whole.