Video for the seminar "Lost and Found", art in the context of endangered languages

(Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Prof. Dr. Jörg Heiser)

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Only the survivor can establish death. The survivor's responsibility, according to Primo Levi, is to witness and is therefore condemned to speak for third parties, on their behalf, avoiding the role of victors, but still collaborating with hegemonic language to convey the experiences of the losers. Deleuze, on the other hand, sympathises with a hybrid and transitory identity that is not stable but constantly reconfigured.  "In order to achieve self-identity, the subject must identify with the imagined other - must submit to alienation, must assume its identity outside itself..." 
The core element of the video is the word "human" spoken in different languages, visualised through an audio spectrum and transformed into a video by a neural network. The dynamics of the abstract minimalist narrative metaphorically show the absorption of the majority by the minority. The dominant languages merge into a chorus and hum, the "whispered utterance" of the disappearing/sleeping languages fades away, even if they appear as soloists for a while. Multitudes of the hegemonic languages, momentarily in solidarity with it, collapse and become it, empathising with the experience of the Other.