Andy Graydon’s sound installation Honesty (on glass) plays eerie whispers and mumblings together with airy ambient tones that emit directly from the window glass of the exhibition space. Their source remains elusive, but the noises most resemble a voice that repeatedly attempts to speak, but falls instead into a blurred humming that haunts and thickens the space of the gallery.

The piece explores notions of “honesty” in architectural expression as championed by the style known as Brutalism and associated with the architect Paul Rudolph. The sound is made by an AI voice model that was trained on vocal samples from a performance by the composer Alvin Lucier in which his voice is swallowed up by accumulating room resonances, becoming a musical drone. The voice model, trained on this mix of speech and noise, is then prompted to speak passages from the early writings of Paul Rudolph on the uses of glass in architecture. The AI model renders this collision of voice and text into a unique hybrid of mangled language, song, and concrete sound that illuminates the acoustics of the exhibition space while simultaneously inhabiting it with an uncanny and unsettled presence.