Somerset House Studios

Conversations about language. Artist Nick Ryan presents an ontological adventure into voice recognition, language, semiotics, sensory experience, immersive sound and imagination.  The series documents and delves into the research being undertaken by Nick Ryan and his collaborators for RE:COGNITION, an interdisciplinary project exploring the connection between the sound of spoken language) and meanings manifest in the physical world as sound or concepts otherwise capable of being represented sonically. In this episode Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, puts forward the radical proposal that everything we perceive as reality, in fact bears little relation to the ‘real’ world in which we live. His work is based on evolution and rigorous modelling, and reflects on Nick’s mission to build a machine that translates spoken language into the audible sensation of its meaning. Don is an author of over 100 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Inte