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'This desire and need for solitude on-line and yet the paradox to want to make connections is the reason why I focused on the voice as a particular sound. The voice beckons, enchants, berates, it is semantic and sonor, makes collective sense and produces useful personal non-sense. The internet is full of unspoken voices. News reports, articles, written information, where a writer is assumed but never furnished with a voice. Of course there a spoken blogs to download, radio streams etc. but in general the written word wins over its articulation. To use the voice and to curate voice-work on-line produces vocal rooms, rooms that are the body of the speaker. Sitting there in the semi dark is a small human being or two, created through our own auditory imagination.' - Salomé Voegelin.

Read the full welcome talk given by Salomé Voegelin at the exhibition launch in 2007.

The viewer as listener is spoken to his mouth. Voices, bouncing through the virtual space, almost inaudibly at times, communicating indirectly to their addressee. The mouth is averted, so to speak, and is, as in David Mollin’s text, I Like Hauser and Wirth, whispering in somebody else’s ear and silencing his voice. Amplifying such silence through thick mucous Douglas Park’s Hollow Open Fort/ Open Cave Tunnel hauls us round the space where no sound comes forth and so much is expected. The gap between teeth and tongue is grossly exposed, open to infection.

Alex Smalley’s audio-visual walk through nature in Wildlife Observations is intimate and private. I am not spoken to and yet included. The pace of solitary breathing, ticking along in the nostalgia of Clare Gasson’s cinematographic darkness, Entre Chien et Loup. Descending the streets of Marseille, made out only just in the voice of the narrator, I am alone but safe in the rhythm of the carefully drafted words. By contrast, Johannes Maier’s Vale and Ameneh have no such shape. Their narrative is fragile, immanently breakable, like the vases in the background. I carefully place it together in my ears, rubbing my eyes.

In Seth Price’s Title Variable, records are stacked up, seating is arranged, conversations rehearsed, and again we are left alone. I browse whilst listening to the records, looking over my shoulder. This is an awkward solitude. Interrupting, Richard Brautigan has a confident voice. Reverberating through nature he observes the world via trout, measuring it by telephone booths and negotiating traffic, Trout Fishing in America.

In This is a short extract from a conversation I had with my friend Sebastian Hofmann, Jörg Köppl starts a conversation with his own voice. Concept meeting the visceral, my inner-ear stretches to hear what was never going to be spoken. Rob Stone meanwhile engages his operatic protagonists in duets with dust and architecture, Eyes with Hope Gleaming, testing the aleatory boundaries of vocal recordings.

Vicki Bennett’s Abridged too Far has a Ned Seagoon quality about it. The borrowed voices, quavering tunes and sliding juxtapositions bring forth an isle of forceful 50’s light-heartedness, lifting my spirits and making me hum.