Harry Yeff, the record-breaking composer, beatboxer and multidisciplinary artist who is using voice as a medium for creating sculptural works - Voice Gems - preserving everything from endangered species to the voices of influential people including Ai Weiwei, Dr. Jane Goodall, Will.i.am, Sir Geoff Hurst, Felipe Pantone, Reggie Watts, Lily Cole, Aitor Throup and more.
On 8th September, pioneering artists and technologists Harry Yeff (Reeps100) and Trung Bao will open a solo show across the interior and exterior of London’s W1 Curates presented by W1 Immersive on Oxford Street, where they will debut VOICE GEMS: 1000 YEAR ARCHIVE, a collection of the Earth’s most unique, remarkable and vulnerable voices that have been preserved as individual gemstones.
The exhibition will explore the preservation of the most remarkable, influential and critically endangered voices, which encapsulates messages of love, death, hope and legacy. VOICE GEMS is a generative system designed by Harry Yeff (Reeps100) and Trung Bao. The innovative 200,000 particle system harnesses the fingerprint-like features found in the human voice to generate the colors and the form of the digital and physical one-of-a-kind gemstones, to be stored in the 1000 YEAR VOICE GEMS ARCHIVE. They are the first project in the world to produce gemstone artworks generated from human and animal voices.
VOICE GEMS will also present a physical lab-grown gem “The Everlasting Memory” for the first time, a collaboration with football legend Sir Geoff Hurst, the first man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final. Hurst ́s voice gem is a personal recording, recalling the event. With many of Hurst’s teammates from the legendary 1966 team suffering from Alzheimer’s, the focus of the project is to raise awareness around the illness. Visitors can listen to the immortalized voices that produced the unique gemstone sculptures via QR codes.
Yeff completed three artist residencies at Harvard University, is a Culture leader at The World Economic Forum and has followed in the footsteps of John Cage and Rauschenberg by joining the legendary Experiments in Art and Technology program at Bell Labs. In 2020 Yeff won the Arts and Science Breakthrough with the Falling Walls Foundation for his ongoing portfolio of cutting edge voice and technology experimentation.
