While you are reading this text, which has been designed to be unreadable by computers, everything that is said in this room is being recorded. A computer transcribes the audio files it has captured and translates them into Danish, before uploading the text to Meter’s homepage.

During the exhibition, the carefully worded original English text on the exhibition space’s website was gradually replaced by an unstable bilingual text, one sentence at a time. This text combined the speech recognition software’s interpretation of informal spoken Danish with the formalised English of the global art world, creating a glimpse of a possible hybrid language capable of connecting local everyday experience with global conversations on art.

Blind Listening was presented as part of I would prefer not to, an exhibition at Meter (Copenhagen) exploring the potential of the non-productive, the meaningless, and the functional. The show took place from 2017-08-18 to 2017-12-09, inspired by Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener and its quiet refusal: “I would prefer not to.”