My Word Is Hard To Here 2015
2015, site-specific sound installation

In 2015, Takahashi started the ongoing multimedia piece “My Word Is Hard To Hear” with sound artist, Adrian McBride. This project records readings of Takahashi’s poems, written in her foreign English, and presents them as site-specific sound installations with light visual elements. These poems use two types of collected words. One type is translated/filtered using the idiosyncrasies of online software from her Japanese diary made decades ago. Takahashi revalues the initial journal by selecting segments and subverting the corporate translation products to Investigate the space between language/expression and the communication to the circumstances she lives in. The other type is 40 collected English words from her vocabulary notes from immigration articles which she struggles in understanding, these vocabularies are combined with machine-translated writings to create short haiku poems.

These poems were recorded whispery by Takahashi with her accent, and McBride as a native English speaker, using both lo-fi and hi-fi techniques, as well as noisy vs quiet environments. These readings highlight audiences’ assumption of access to “English” writings, at the same time highlighting what it might be like to lack it. In 2015, “My Word Is Hard To Hear” was presented as an audio installation with two “directional” speakers at the gallery ceiling targeted two small circles on the floor, creating 2 distinct listening stations. The installation became an investigation into intimacy, but perhaps not closeness, in public spaces. Each circle on the floor focused the voice of one of two readers reciting the same poem in whispering tones otherwise lost amongst the space's other noise. Without sharing with the listener any personal details apart from the readers’ manner of speech, the readings highlight the listeners' own understanding of the speakers' ambiguous identities.

Here are some sample sound clips you may here at the location.