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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/retrievals   About ‘Retrievals’:   I like to hear writing that is made out loud Words vibrate in the air and you forget them, but you can feel them on your skin I don’t call what I make ‘radio plays’ I just call them ‘audio pieces’ I like to keep it all as open as possible   ‘Retrievals’ is an audio piece, made using an online automated voice generator There are many sites that offer the use of text-to-voice technology (Vocograb, Voxmark, NaturalReader) These websites can manufacture hundreds of different voices – men, women, children, the elderly – from across many different languages and dialects They offer voices that sound sad, or whisper intimately in your ear Some sites are free Many make you pay for a particular voice   Automated voices are produced for specific practical uses They help the visually impaired, or those who have difficulty reading They inform you where your train is going They ask whether you want to pay with cash or card They are calm and well-mannered They are nearly always women We do not listen to them, only overhear what they have to say People who really listen in on them are often disturbed or put off, and programme their self-service checkout to ‘silent’ when they can   Automated voices do not sound uncanny or robotic to me They sound spectral and angelic Each is a voice that once belonged to someone, each a literal remnant of recordings made by a voice actor, who provided all the phonemes, phrases and speech-parts, which are put together later ‘Retrievals’ was made using a character called ‘Will (Sad)’, from acapela-boxcom The website contains no information concerning the real human being who was paid to perform the words for ‘Will (Sad)’ Any chance beauty of accent or inflection this voice might still possess remains only as the echo of something once heard, then lost, now forever misremembered If automated voices sound ‘futuristic’ then it’s a backwards kind of future They are forecasts of what has already been said   I never keep what I’ve written for audio pieces; in this respect, voice-generator websites are ideal You can

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

READ NEXT

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Issue No. 18

Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 18

This is the editorial from the eighteenth print issue of The White Review, available to buy here.    In 1991...

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June 2016

Heteronormativity and the Single Mother

Jacinda Townsend

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June 2016

I.   This spring, in cities and towns all over the United States, schools, churches and other organisations will...

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Issue No. 1

From the Town

Desmond Hogan

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Issue No. 1

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School,...

 

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