Month: May 2025

The project comes from my personal experience as an Italian living in London. I constantly shift between Italian and English, not just in formal settings, but in everyday life, in texts, voice notes, misunderstandings, and half-translated thoughts. This bilingual friction is part of how I experience the world. It’s messy, funny, emotional — and that’s exactly what I wanted to bring into the project.

Oi Zizzi – the project  

https://sore-icy-pheasant.glitch.me

[Editor’s note: In case the website is not accessible or experiences any issues, the videos below are the same as those available on the main site. They have been uploaded here via YouTube as a backup to ensure continued access.]

By playing with voice messages and subtitles that fail, contradict, or mistranslate, my aim was to capture and show that confusion and vulnerability that often comes with living between languages. The context is domestic and familiar but it’s also a metaphor for navigating hybrid identities and miscommunication.

The final video series serves as a documentation of the development and criticality of my enquiry. Each piece captures everyday conversations with a friend, but what defines them is the way subtitles are animated, distorted, or reimagined to introduce ambiguity and interpretation. These experiments have not only allowed me to visualise my research, but also helped generate further questions. They reflect my interest in exploring a topic that is often standardised — subtitling — through the lens of graphic communication design. As both a musician and a graphic designer, making this project allowed me to have fun while working on it — to play, to question, and to connect with the things I care about most.

Not gonna lie, this project led me to a loooot of thinking, scripting, overthinking, questioning, and doubting. Every week I kept having more questions, which just brought more doubts. Since I was the creator of my audios, I wanted to have a clear narrative. And above all, you almost need a strategy or at least a clever way with the subtitles to communicate the message I wanted to share. I wanted to do it in a way that was smart but simple.

Proof of my overthinking – my notes.

Rainy day

Italian hand gesture meaning “What are you talking about?!”

Primarily, I worked with After Effects and created various interactions (as you can see in the following video). However, my aim wasn’t simply to visualise and animate the text to represent the sound, as that would become too descriptive and unrelated to my enquiry. That’s why I struggled to find different strategies to use subtitles in a way that was both simple and communicative.

During Projection 1, I came to an important realisation: I’m not aiming to universalise or fix meaning — I’m exploring what happens when meaning breaks down. This is why, as I mentioned earlier, the symbolic system I had developed began to feel limiting within my practice. It reduced the richness and ambiguity of voice into fixed categories, which ultimately felt too rigid and reductive.

Instead, my focus during Projection 2 shifted towards the subtleties of subtitling and its standardisation. This interest grew out of a longer trajectory in my work, as the notion of standardisation has been a recurring theme in my enquiry since Unit 2.

This shift in focus led to the core enquiry of my final project: My project explores how subtitling, often considered a neutral tool for accessibility or translation, can instead become a space for interpretation, ambiguity, and emotional resonance. What happens when subtitles are not simply used to “explain” the audio, but to play with it, contradict it, or even fail?

All of this stems from extensive research, during which I collected various references that supported and informed the development of my enquiry.

Kim, C.S. (2015) Close Readings. Available at: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/close-readings-jeffrey-mansfield-ariel-baker-gibbs-alison-odaniel-lauren-ridloff-117969.

Christine Sun Kim inspired me to look beyond my own interpretation of sound and to reflect on the multiple layers through which it can be perceived and translated. Her approach reveals that sound is not neutral — nor are the words used to represent it. I was particularly drawn to the ambiguity she embraces in her work, which resists fixed meanings and opens up space for more personal, subjective interpretations.

Benigni, Roberto and Wright, Steven, ‘Strange to Meet You’, in Coffee and Cigarettes, dir. by Jim Jarmusch, USA: Lakeshore Entertainment, 2003.

The conversational tone and bilingual texture in Strange to Meet You by Benigni and Wright is another key reference: their dialogue plays with rhythm, cultural misunderstanding, and performative language. This blend of absurdity and sincerity has influenced how I construct and voice my scripts, and it inspired me to approach my practice with an ironic tone that helped me convey my concept more naturally. My work is less about translating content and more about staging an encounter between sound and text, voice and interpretation.

Rosler, M., Semiotics of the Kitchen, video performance, 1975. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuZympOIGC0

Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen was also very inspiring for my practice, particularly in the way she subverts systems of standardisation and communication. I loved how she broke the codified language of the kitchen and reclaimed it through irony, physicality, and frustration — turning everyday gestures and objects into tools of resistance and creating a performance that critiques the roles of women in domestic settings. Similarly, my project investigates how everyday speech can be reframed through text and visual form, disrupting the authority of clear, neutral communication.

Beyond Words

I decided to bring together the work developed during Projection 1 to document my practice and help me contextualise it within a more defined narrative. Through the process of editing and subtitling the video, I became increasingly interested in subtitles themselves, not just as a tool for accessibility, but as a rich site for creative exploration.

I began to see subtitles as more than just transcriptions of speech; they became a space where language, tone, and intention could be stretched, questioned, and reimagined. My attention shifted towards the potential of bilingual barriers — how they can confuse, amuse, or even reveal hidden dynamics between languages and speakers. This tension became a fertile ground for play, and formed the basis for further investigation in Projection 2.

My creative process led me to shape my enquiry and question how visual subtitling can go beyond words to capture the emotional and tonal nuances of voice messages. This line of investigation inspired the creation of an emotional legend of symbols, each representing different aspects of speech, such as warmth, privacy, emphasis, mood, and more. These symbols act as a form of visual subtitling, transforming the emotional qualities of the voice into a graphic language.

The choice to create my own “system” of symbols emerged as a natural extension of my enquiry. I think that symbols are a strong tool for communication — they can turn complex emotions into something simple and easy to recognise. I was interested in using them not to explain the voice, but to suggest how it feels. In our digital culture, we often use visual signs to react or express emotions — like emojis in chats or reactions on social media. So using symbols felt like a clear and intuitive way to explore the emotional layers of voice.

I was curious to see how a voice message could be interpreted and represented using my symbol legend on a white canvas. I imagined the artworks I created as a sort of musical staff made of symbols, visually interpreting the content of the selected voice message. I also experimented with colours and shapes, creating abstract and geometric compositions by playing with lines and curves.

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To further engage the audience, I developed a prototype of an interactive website. This platform invites users to listen to voice messages and create their own visual artwork using the symbols from my legend. It’s an experimental, evolving tool, designed to encourage users to explore the emotional nuances of sound in a tangible, personal way.

https://dust-boiling-storm.glitch.me

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During my practice, several critical questions started to emerge. One of the things my symbols made me reflect on was their stillness. I began to find them a bit limiting, especially because when I think of music, I think of rhythm and movement — not something fixed or static. This led me to start experimenting with my symbols in After Effects, using them as subtitles and bringing them to life through motion.

First iterations
To begin my research, I started collecting sounds from my family and friends. I’ve always noticed how often we use sounds more than words, perhaps because of the immediacy they offer in expressing something. During my year abroad in the UK, my international friends and I often joked about our different ways of vocalising emotions and how these sounds reflect our identities and modes of expression. This inspired me to create a sort of sound archive, beginning with emotions and later categorising the recordings based on technical audio characteristics. These iterations helped me reflect on how sound can sometimes act as a cultural barrier, but also how, in many cases, it reveals cross-cultural similarities that allow us to understand one another even more deeply than words.

Given that sound is such a broad theme, I decided to narrow down my research and, as mentioned earlier, I chose voice messages as the main medium through which to develop my project. I feel deeply connected to voice messages because they are part of my daily life. They allow me to stay in touch with friends and feel close to my family, who live far away. While many people would find voice messages annoying (most of the time, let’s admit it hehe), I believe that hearing someone’s voice, rather than just reading a text, carries a much greater emotional weight and leaves a lasting impression over time. That’s why I decided to take one of my mom’s supportive voice messages to start with my practice.

Starting with the software Audacity, I analysed one of my mom’s voice messages and I explored the visual patterns of sound waves and the textures they created. I attempted to classify traditional sound characteristics, such as pitch and rhythm, unconventionally — focusing solely on the textures and deliberately ignoring the conventional visual cues typically associated with those parameters. This approach offered me a fresh perspective on the auditory experience.

This experimentation and interpretation led me to reflect on the possibility of creating my own, unconventional system — one that could propose new “rules” for how I could interpret and communicate sound visually. Even though I didn’t want to work with soundwaves directly, these iterations helped me develop new categories and made me reflect on how I could invent alternative ways of communicating my enquiry more effectively.

A Prelude to Projection 1

As I entered Unit 3, the narrative thread of standardisation remained central to my enquiry, but it shifted focus — from the body and the book to sound, and more specifically, the voice. In my previous work, I explored how reading could become a sensory and embodied experience, challenging the conventions that shape how we engage with books. This same interest in disrupting norms now informs my exploration of how we represent and interpret voice.

Georges Cziffra pianist Exhibition – Budapest 2024

This shift in focus was also inspired by an exhibition I visited in Budapest in December 2024, dedicated to the pianist Georges Cziffra. What struck me was the interactive nature of the exhibition — rather than presenting his life and work in a static, archival way, it invited visitors to actively engage with his musical process and professional journey. It was an unusual and immersive experience that inspired me to explore sound in a more personal and interpretive way within my own practice.

As a musician, sound has always felt like a natural language to me — something I intuitively understand and perform, almost like a mother tongue. But this exhibition made me reflect on the audience’s perspective. How do others perceive sound? What happens when they’re not trained to read musical notation? These questions became critical in shaping my enquiry: how can sound be translated, visualised, or made emotionally accessible to those who might not “speak” it fluently?

Cage, J. (1969) Notation. New York: Something Else Press

Lupi, G. and Posavec, S. (2015) Dear Data.

Kim, C.S. (2020) The Rhythm Pyramids

These references have been key in inspiring my practice and shaping a more critical understanding of my work. John Cage’s Notation (1969) was very visually captivating and it challenged my understanding of how music and sound can be represented — pushing the boundaries of traditional musical scores and highlighting the expressive potential of experimental forms. Christine Sun Kim offered a powerful reflection on sound from a Deaf perspective, prompting me to consider how rhythm, tone, and silence can be felt, seen, and interpreted beyond hearing. Finally, Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec showed me how personal, emotional experiences can be transformed into visual systems — a process that resonated deeply with my intention to turn something as intimate and fluid as voice into a form of visual expression. These works collectively encouraged me to see sound not just as something to be heard, but as something that can be read, felt, and questioned.