Recently, Abe Pazos Solatie presented an installation entitled The Resonating Ink of Our Words at the Festival della Peste in Milan (5–9 November 2025). The installation consists of a device with two microphones that collects participants’ personal narratives and then transforms them into visual art. The human voice is explored in its unique sonic characteristics… which software written by the artist converts into complex patterns and textures traced by a pen plotter on paper, creating a large collective drawing. Abe Pazos Solatie tells us how.
Elena Giulia Rossi: Can you tell us about the work you presented at the Festival in the broader context of your research into algorithmic rules and noise?
Abe Pazos Solatie: The work I presented at the Festival involved two parts: one in which I invited visitors to participate by leaving two short recordings of their voice: one related to Power and the other to Pleasure. The second part converted the recorded voices into line based designs that were drawn on paper using a pen plotter.
In my work I always use computer code and numbers. Those numbers can be generated by the code, sometimes randomly, and other times by mathematical functions (for instance, the sine and cosine functions). There are also many other functions one can use for creative purposes, for example the Perlin Noise function created by the mathematician Ken Perlin for the movie Tron in the early 80s.
In the work I presented at the Festival I tried to avoid using numbers generated by mathematical functions, and instead use only numbers coming from analyzing the voice recordings. For me, it was important that if a person talked to the microphone using the exact same tone and timing (something probably impossible to achieve, but that’s a different discussion), it should produce the same drawing again. I focused only on the “rules” writing aspect, while avoiding randomness.
I did this because I wanted to see if we could distinguish, by looking at the resulting drawings, whether there was a difference in the way people talk about the two topics of the Festival.
Your research often involves translation, as in Ink Waves Decoded, where the gestures of drawing are translated from analogue to code and back again. What have these transitions between gesture and code taught you about the logic of code, but also about the logic that “regulates” the gestures of drawing?
That’s an interesting question. I think I cannot say there’s a universal logic regulating gestures when drawing because every person has a different set of unspoken rules. I see this when I look at other people’s art: I may see compositions that completely break my own rules. Or sometimes they do match the way I draw. Both are pleasant. The first case can teach me something new, the second feels good as when someone agrees with what you say, and you feel connected to them.
About jumping between code and drawing, I don’t find plain computer code great for describing drawings, but I do enjoy the challenge, both of observing drawings and trying to think of rules that might produce similar images, and also of inventing algorithms to make it easier to express how lines should be laid out on a paper and how they should relate to each other. It’s a bit like inventing a programming language to describe drawings. It is not as complicated as it may sound to non-programmers. The tool I’ve been using since 2020 (OPENRNDR) has made it easier and more fun to experiment with such ideas.
Is there anything that links The Resonating Ink of our words with Ink Waves Decoded, even though the latter focuses on the expressive qualities of the human voice?
One obvious connection is that both share the same medium: a pen plotter, pen, ink and computer code. This comes with a shared process and constraints. And in both I tried to learn something about existing media: in one case, existing drawings, and in the other, human voice recordings. An important difference though is that the first one was not time-related (because I observed finished drawings instead of the process of drawing) while time is an essential component in sound recordings.
What were your expectations when you brought this project to the festival, and what was the outcome in hindsight?
More than expectations I had the hope that people would participate and be interested in it, and that the complicated technical part would work well. I was surprised by the outcome. There were almost two hundred recordings drawn onto paper, creating three collaborative drawings almost four meters in length in total. But what I really loved was how curious most people were. I did not expect that, and the Milanese audience at Il Festival della Peste was truly wonderful. They had many questions, and they spent much time observing the pen plotter drawing and often coming back at a later time to study how their voice had been converted to those curious strange shapes, and comparing them to other shapes.
Abe Pazos Solatie is a Berlin-based artist who explores digital entities that can be perceived as organic or living, through writing code to generate static, moving or interactive images. His works take the form of prints, live performances and interactive installations, united by the desire to understand ourselves by recreating artificial environments that appear familiar but are not entirely recognisable. Inspired by nature, he combines mathematics, randomness and geometry, exhibiting and performing internationally. Self-taught, he began experimenting with computer graphics at an early age. He is an active member of the Creative Coding community and maintainer of OPENRNDR.
