Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Harry Yeff.
Harry Yeff, aka Reeps100, is a London-born neurodivergent artist and technologist specializing in voice, AI, and tech-based performance art.
Yeff emerged from a working-class background, dedicating his life to art and concept. He has been visualizing the voice for 15 years and is globally celebrated as a leader in a new wave of voice technology-focused experimentation despite a very nontraditional pathway into fine art and new media. He continues to build on his skillset by utilizing an almost inhuman vocal range to drive his works.
Yeff rose to fame in the early 2010s as a beatboxer. His inhuman-natured vocal ability opened up a slew of voice, technology and academic collaborations, leading him to amass a global following, rendering over 100 million views online. Notable academic partnerships include three separate Harvard residencies, the last of which was followed quickly by a collaboration with Leipzig Opera House in Germany, where Yeff produced and directed the world's first-ever AI ballet.
His role as an ambassador for art, technology and voice has seen him give notable talks on creativity, the arts and innovation at Google Exec, SXSW, Art Basel Hong Kong, Glastonbury Pyramid Stage and Nike Global. Yeff has also exhibited internationally at both the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Tate Britain in London. He has contributed work to Milan, London and Tokyo Design weeks, SXSW, Miami Art Basel, Davos 2020, United Nations Geneva and Sundance Film Festival. His latest talk and performance at the TED Countdown Summit went live in March 2022.
In addition, Yeff is a culture leader at The World Economic Forum and has worked with the Experiments in Art and Technology program, founded by John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg at Bell Labs. His multidisciplinary practices in new media have established artist-in-residence roles at Factory Berlin and Sonar Barcelona. In 2020, Yeff won the Arts and Science Breakthrough with the Falling Walls Foundation for his ongoing portfolio of voice and technology experimentation.
Harry is another one of those people where I felt like I needed to include the long bio, because his career has had so many fun, surprising turns. I met him through my work as a curator of new media art.
What I so appreciate about his practice is how he’s asking us to return to perhaps our most basic technology: our voices. Oftentimes when folks invoke the voice it’s in service of language or meaning. What Harry highlights is the voice itself—its raw capabilities, how precious each individual voice is.
Harry developed this appreciation at a young age, as an artist wielding his voice as an instrument. This has been his launchpad into all kinds of notable work—artistic, scholarly, and hybrid. I know this channel can get pretty dark—after all, there’s a lot worth being concerned about. But there’s an urgency to wonder and exploration too; to encountering new ideas that expand your perception.
Every time I speak to Harry, I’m left with a renewed excitement for the possibilities of voice—and I’m sure you’ll feel the same in this conversation with my friend, Harry Yeff, aka Reeps100.
Some other episodes you might like:
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with geometallurgist & Circular Economy advocate Simon Michaux:
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