READER: ORBIT
23.07.2025
Brigitta Muntendorf: ORBIT – A War Series (2023)
The 3D-audio space oratorio ORBIT – A War Series for AI voice clones and electronics is a work commissioned by the Venice Biennale 2023 and developed in cooperation with d&b audio and the Ukrainian voice cloning company Respeecher.
In an immersive sound space, disembodied voices encircle the audience with haunting testimonies of the wars and power struggles that have been waged against the female body for millennia.
The use of sound synthesis, AI and deep learning technologies for digital voice and song generation creates immortal female fighters and a post-human, techno-futuristic choir that both sensually and politically proclaims the opera of the future.
The title ORBIT – A War Series is a reference to the New York artist Nancy Spero, who in The War Series (1966–70) explains the female body in the Vietnam War as the scene of demonstrations of power and violence. The texts in ORBIT are based on interviews, reports and documentaries from Afghanistan, Iran, DR Congo, Poland, the USA and the Second World War in Asia (comfort women); the war reporter Christina Lamb, who addresses the audience directly in a prologue, plays a central role.
The protagonists of the immersive soundscape are AI voice clones who have stripped themselves of their physical bodies and found refuge in an imaginary orbit. According to philosopher Simone Weil, violence turns every living being into a thing: these voices are searching for a place to become human, a place where shame and socially evoked stigmatization are replaced by participation. They come from all parts of the world and their realities, their stories are contemporary or millennia old and revolve around the wars against the female body. They permeate mechanisms of systemic violence against women and connect individual fates with the social and global collective. Their voices are cloned voices of female singers, survivors and activists:
Catherine Lamb in "1. Prologue"There is so much evil that sometimes I felt that I had to stop, take a breath, look at a tree, and remember that there is calm and beauty in this world. Surely, surely the least we can do is listen to those brave women and girls and share those stories and make sure that the history of women in war is no longer a history of silence and that war rape is no longer the world's most neglected war crime.
Denis Mukwege in "3. Precious as Gold"Rape as a weapon is even more effective than all the classic weapons that we have. Because, when you can just see the impact of rape in a community…is to destroy all the family and to destroy the social fabric of the community, to reduce demography of population to destroy the economy –
Protest calls, from "6. PEOPLE UNITED / Iran"Zan. Zendegi. Azadi – Women. Life. Freedom Hiz toi harze toi, zane azadeh manam - You are philanderer, you are the slut, I am the free woman
The idea for the sound dome consisting of two concentric circles was also inspired by Spero, by her interpretation of the goddess Nut: the Egyptian goddess of the sky, the cosmos, of mothers and patron goddess of the dead arches protectively over a lifeless female body, an ideogram for maternal protection and comfort.
ORBIT – A War Series appeals to our inner images: When sound and space develop performance, it is inevitably the audience that is at the centre of this production. Listening itself becomes a radical act, ‘Radical Listening’, the radical positioning with the Other.
Brigitta Muntendorf on ORBIT – A War Series in an interview with Verena Hahn.
CREDITS
Brigitta Muntendorf: composition, text, artistic direction
Moritz Lobeck, Brigitta Muntendorf: concept
Mehdi Moradpour: dramaturgy
Lukas Nowok: programming
Begoña Garcia Navas: lighting concept
Christina Lamb: war correspondent
Denis Mukwege: Nobel Peace Prize laureate, founder and chief surgeon of Panzi Hospital (DR Congo)
Respeecher: AI-Voice Cloning
Alfred Wegener Institute / NOAA-Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory: field recordings
Ralf Zuleeg: d&b audiotechnik