Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is the practice of producing speech-like sounds that are thought by some to be a divine form of proto-language.<br><br>Materially, In Tongues (2024) comprises an endless stream of randomly concatenated n-grams extracted from Proust’s Swann’s Wa y. Groups of letters cascade down the screen in fits and starts. Flowing at speeds often too fast to comprehend, it becomes a fog. The particular form taken—that of language streaming down a screen, faster than one could type—calls to mind the chat interfaces that have become our primary mode of interaction with language models.<br><br>Zucconi’s recent work has dealt with populations of images and their proximity to language, using tactics as simple as cropping and re-sequencing. Similarly, n-grams—a contiguous sequence of N items from a given sample of text—become literal crops of language. By knitting them together, the work facilitates a kind of simultaneous reading of the source text.
