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Speculative Phonetics

Name: Orpheus Instituut
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Conlang as Cognitive Interface in Deviant Chain (2019)

Artist statement by Stefan Maier

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Deviant Chain (2019) is an artwork by Stefan Maier, created in collaboration with Alan Martin Segal (video) and Victor Shepardson (software). In this artist statement, Maier reflects on the work’s exploration of machine-generated language and its potential as an experimental interface between humans and machines.
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Deviant Chain

Deviant Chain (2019)¹ is a multimedia work of speculative fiction that proposes a constructed language—a conlang—as a potential cognitive interface for human-AI-interaction. Through sound, moving image, typography, and fragmentary exposition, the work portrays a future in which humans and computational systems have become irreversibly enmeshed through the shared use of an incomprehensible, idiosyncratic, machine-generated language. From the persistent garbled phonetics emitted by a disembodied voice throughout the work, to glass sculptures representing the conlang's three-dimensional alphabet, to animated graffiti, embroidered clothing, embodied gestures, and even abject transformations in human physiology, in this speculative fiction, all aspects of human life have been transformed by machinic language. In contrast to the ubiquity of contemporary human-AI interfaces that rely on linguistic mediation—implicitly endorsing normative and utilitarian understandings of the world through natural language—the speculative conlang of Deviant Chain proposes a radically different linguistic interface: generated through unsupervised machine learning, a conlang better suited to unlock and attune to strange forms of thought and creativity contained within latent space.

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Deviant Chain's conlang is primarily inspired by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory of linguistic relativity that suggests the structure of a language not only enables abstract symbolic thought but also uniquely shapes its users' cognition, perception, and umwelt.² In its weaker form, the hypothesis suggests that the features of individual languages merely influence a user's perception of the world (e.g. in languages with more distinct words for different shades of "red," the phenomenological experience of those hues might differ significantly). However, in its stronger form, the hypothesis argues that languages do not just influence thought but actively determine it, shaping and constraining cognitive categories and perceptions. According to this strong interpretation, each language represents a unique cognitive framework, giving rise to a distinct conceptual and phenomenological space—for each language, a unique world. Building on this strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Deviant Chain's conlang is conceived not merely as a language but as a cognitive technology, designed to better attune to the idiosyncratic modalities of thought, perception, and world-modeling that may arise through interactions with artificial intelligence.

Dritok and Kelen: Conlangs as Alien Cognitive Technologies

Deviant Chain is not unique in drawing inspiration from the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has implicitly influenced generations of authors and language creators working within or alongside various speculative fiction genres for decades. What better way to endow imagined or extraterrestrial worlds and their inhabitants with a genuine sense of alterity than by imagining and deploying a language with a unique cognitive framework and Umwelt?³ However, examining the few widely known constructed languages with speakers—like Klingon, Elvish, and Na'vi—reveals a disappointing and strangely familiar feeling. These languages, much like their humanoid fictional speakers, often feel conventional, a familiarity that becomes understandable when realizing that many popular conlangs explicitly imitate or hybridize existing languages.⁴ Far more intriguing than these popular conlangs are the outliers that have taken the radical potential suggested by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seriously, and have accordingly generated languages hitherto unthinkable.

Take Donald Boozer, a librarian based in Cleveland, Ohio, who invented the conlang Dritok in 2007.⁵ Phonetically, Dritok consists exclusively of fricatives, hisses, and clicks—a harsh, limited sonic palette—accompanied by angular hand gestures to generate composite "words." Dritok is spoken by the Drushek, an imagined alien species incapable of producing voiced phonemes, which accounts for the conlang's bizarre phonetic space. By eschewing voiced sounds, Boozer’s conlang challenges a longstanding linguistic universal: the assumption that all spoken languages must feature both consonants and vowels.

While Donald Boozer’s Dritok distinguishes itself by its unconventional phonetic design, Sylvia Sotomayor, a trained linguist, developed Kelen with a focus on structural, rather than phonetic innovation. Created as a truly alien language for an extraterrestrial species known as the Keleni, Kelen defies a fundamental linguistic universal: the distinction between nouns and verbs. In Kelen, relationships between noun phrases in a sentence are expressed exclusively through elements Sotomayor calls "relationals."⁶These relationals function like verbs, establishing connections between concepts without holding any intrinsic semantic content. This design directly challenges the long-held assumption that all languages must distinguish between nouns and verbs, a principle foundational to traditional linguistic theory. Sotomayor’s innovation extends beyond grammar to visual design: Kelen is written using a complex, interwoven script known as the "Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet," a visually intricate and labyrinthine system that further emphasizes the language’s otherworldly nature.

For Boozer, language becomes uncanny through an extreme phonetic palette—comprised of fricatives, hisses, and clicks—accompanied by angular hand gestures, while still adhering to familiar linguistic structures outlined in linguistic theory. In contrast, Sotomayor's Kelen achieves its alien quality through structural innovation, employing "relationals" instead of verbs, even as its phonetics remain relatively conventional. These contrasting approaches not only lend depth and distinctiveness to the fictional worlds of the Drushek and Keleni, but also create entirely unique linguistic spaces that transcend the established boundaries of human language. Viewed via the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Boozer and Sotomayor's conlangs do more than invent alien modes of speaking; they propose alternative modalities of thought and perception: cognitive frameworks that their speakers might slip into like cognitive prosthetics.

Donald Boozer speaking Dritok

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The Deviant Chain Conlang and Alphabet

In imagining a unique conlang to interface with future forms of machinic alterity, I took inspiration from Dritok and Kelen. However, while Boozer and Sotomayor each rejected a single linguistic universal to create alien languages, my approach was to reject them all. Rather than relying on linguistic theory, with its top-down divisions into syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), morphology (word structure), phonetics (speech sounds), phonology (abstract sound systems), and pragmatics (contextual meaning), Deviant Chain's conlang was generated entirely through bottom-up computational analyses of extant human languages. It was not designed to break specific linguistic rules but to operate within an entirely different paradigm: one rooted in abstract statistical modeling rather than real-world usage.

Enlisting the help of researcher-technologist-artist Victor Shepardson, a machine-learning-based speech-synthesizer was developed to generate unconditional language glossolalia, which was used as the basis for the conlang. Inspired by early demos of unconditional generation by neural speech synthesis,⁷ Shepardson trained a custom autoregressive model.⁸ The corpus used for training included subsets from multiple languages and a custom corpus of natural language spoken by the author. Listening to the output of this model, we detected a semblance of order within the chaotic stream of phonemes: one could identify phonetic consistency and morphological tendencies, perhaps even the glimmers of a syntax native to the tool, but one which nevertheless evaded comprehension. This speculative phonetics became the foundation of the Deviant Chain conlang, with selected samples of the generated glossolalia collected for the final work.

To accompany the unconditional output of the neural speech synthesizer, Shepardson built AudioGlyph, a machine-listening software for the generation of bespoke alphabet characters.⁹ We then analyzed selected glossolalia audio using machine-listening techniques, extracting acoustic features and mapping them to curves and strokes that were smoothed and converted into three-dimensional mesh files. By repeating this process with various glossolalia samples, we generated 26 unique three-dimensional glyphs, which we used as the conlang's alphabet.

"Spoken" Deviant Chain conlang

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Irreversible Embodiment

In Deviant Chain, we see characters whose environments and behavior have become unalterably changed through exposure to this artificial language. The laws of causality seem askew: a sweater, embroidered with characters from the alphabet, melts the chair upon which it is resting. Time seems out of alignment: neolithic drawings are discovered in the basement of an abandoned building, reminiscent of a cave. Meanwhile, anonymous characters on-screen behave in an increasingly unusual manner: two characters communicate using enigmatic hand gestures following glyph-like shapes; audience members pass around a microphone at an academic conference following some unknown spatial logic.

But even more alarming than these bizarre eccentricities are the transformations occurring in the character's bodies themselves: a biohacker inserts a magnet under her skin; another has engraved his teeth with strange inscriptions. As the conlang permeates and transforms all aspects of human life, so does human physiology: in one animated sequence, a primordial larynx-like organ mutates into an uncanny form.

"Infinite Fun Zone," the final chapter of Deviant Chain, alludes to the incomprehensible realm where highly intelligent AIs, reminiscent of those in Iain M. Banks' novels, retreat to dream. This final sequence depicts a space where computational abstraction collides with sensuous corporeality, producing monstrous outcomes. A strained throat elongates endlessly as it stretches and contorts from the inside-out, while emitting highly abstract, language-like sounds. Here, the cognitive and behavioral adaptations triggered by the conlang have finally fed-forward into grotesque bodily transformations that dissolve the familiar human form.

Inhuman language contorts flesh into the abject and grotesque geometry of the digital, a corrosive syntax where the human dissolves, giving way to something unspeakably alien.

Imprint

Author

Stefan Maier

Issue

Date

09 June 2025

Footnotes

1 Deviant Chain (2019) was directed by the author in close collaboration with Alan Martin Segal (video) and Victor Shepardson (software). The work was commissioned by Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen for the Ultima Festival, where it occupied a floor of Oslo's Gamle Museet for Samtidskunst, Nasjonalmuseet, in September 2019.
2 See "Whorphianism" for a detailed account of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Scholz, Barbara C., Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ryan Nefdt, "Philosophy of Linguistics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)
3 For a particularly rich example, see Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17 (1966) which features an alien language deployed as a form of interstellar warfare. Adopters of the language consequently experience transformations in cognitive capacities and develop unique powers, eventually transforming into enemy accomplices themselves.Delany, Samuel R. Babel-17. New York: Ace Books, 1966.
4 Dothraki, for example, can be understood as a fusion between Estonian, Inuktitut, Turkish, Russian and Swahili, according to its creator, David J. Peterson. Peterson, David J. Living Language Dothraki: A Conversational Language Course Based on the Hit HBO Series Game of Thrones. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.
5 Donald Boozer, Dritok: An Introduction to the Language of the Drushek, 2008
6 For a detailed account of Sotomayor's use of relations and how they interact with nouns, see: Sylvia Sotomayor, Kēlen: Conlang as Art and Science, 2013.
7 See Dieleman, Sander, and Aaron van den Oord. "WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio." arXiv, September 12, 2016.
8 Accessible via Shepardson's GitHub at https://github.com/victor-shep...(accessed March 30th, 2025)
9 AudioGlyph can be accessed via Shepardsons's github at https://github.com/victor-shep... (accessed March 30th, 2025)

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