Terminal Taxonomy

Terminal Taxonomy is a live audiovisual production built around a machine that is trying, and steadily failing, to understand what it is hearing. The piece runs on a custom TouchDesigner system: a modified speech-to-text operator listens to live vocal samples and reports three things back — its transcription, the language it believes it detected, and its own confidence in both.

That confidence is the instrument. While the system is sure of itself the piece holds together; as certainty drops, entropy rises and carries through everything downstream. A 3D bio-sphere rendered in TouchDesigner, driven through TDBitwig by the sonic transients of a modular rig, begins to break up. A real-time typewriter log prints the machine’s attempts as they fail — a fossil record of a language dissolving in front of it.

Ten LED bars carry that same entropy value out of the patch and into the room over Art-Net. The mapping is deliberately one to one: the system’s internal state is not drawn as a graph on a screen but staged as physical light around the audience, so the thing going wrong is happening in the space rather than being reported from it.

The design premise is that the failure should be legible. Most systems suppress low-confidence output, or quietly correct it, and present only the clean result. Here the confidence value is the score, the lighting cue, and the subject of the piece at once — and the performance is improvised against whatever the machine makes of it.