A close up of a hanging sculpture with wooden frames that have masses of plastic tubes twisting, turning, and falling inside, over, and throughout. There are two microphones and several speakers placed on the wood.

Meesh Sara Fradkin, a Ph.D. candidate at IDMIL, premiers a voice-activated sculpture that listens to the formation of speech and explores the loss of meaning in buzzwords. Powered by a sonified dictionary composed of jargon, babbel questions positionality in the arts by bringing attention to who is participating in real time. 

Suspended from the ceiling, babbel is five multi-tiered wooden chandeliers adorned with steel rods, plastic tubing, 3D printed parts, cables, very loud speakers, and condenser microphones, emitting sounds in response to words overheard in the gallery space. Fradkin’s installation invites visitors to consider how words are hollowed out by use, overuse, or misuse. 

babbel, is currently on display as part of the Experiments in Art, Access, and Technology (E.A.A.T.) exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, U.C. Irvine, and will be open for viewing until January 13, 2024. For more information about Meesh Sara Fradkin’s work and this exhibition, you can visit the following link: https://leonardo.info/criptech/eaat 

Five sculptures with wooden frames threaded with masses of plastic tubes spill out into the room, hanging from a ceiling grid framed by white gallery walls and white furniture. Three screens are mounted on the back wall, the center one is black, while the two on the sides display Cellular Corpses by thai Lu. In the right corner, two small 3D-printed models of the sculptures live on a white pedestal stand.