Jan Vodstrčil
GD1: Under Construction
What if you asked AI something it wasn’t ready for?
My part of this project consisted of sound design for twenty 15-second clips, animated by Matěj Lesser and Adéla Janatová, of an AI chatbot being asked a question and subsequently glitching out.
Being given the sound design of Joi from Blade Runner 2049 as reference, I chose to draw inspiration from the sounds of modern user interfaces while including some cinematic-style candy (that would be obtrusive in a practical UI). I aimed for surface friendliness and harmlessness with undertones of barely-in-check power.
After the chatbot glitches out, it starts talking over itself, before its monologue turns into noise, which then degrades to absolute data overwhelm. I used quantization, wave rectification, and clipping to mimic the ways a signal would degrade on a real “overwhelmed” system.
All sound was produced using only stock devices in Bitwig, except keyboard sounds, which I recorded and manipulated to match the animation. I utilized randomness in device parameter automation to produce subtle differences for video parts that repeated across different animations.
Installation, Summer 2026. Graphic Design 1 studio, Faculty of Art and Design, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University. Part of Under Construction by Matěj Lesser and Adéla Janatová; supervised by Adam Uchytil and Marek Fanta.
I Am the Mother of Your Children, Mom.
How do you break free from the cycle of a family plagued by crime and drug addiction? How do you realize that, as a person, you always have a choice about who you become and which path you take? How do you, an abandoned child, not just fall apart?
In Natalia Tina Jeleva’s personal confession, expressed through on-stage performative dance and storytelling, I took the role of composer and sound designer, producing over 50 minutes of continuous music and sound that leads the audience through Tina’s story where she embodies her parents, scarred by drugs and the gang environment, as well as her role as the oldest sibling in a family where functional authority is lacking.
My work in this project consists of background music that plays under voiceover recordings of Tina reading her eponymous book, leading her improvised dance on stage, and morphs into full-on experimental dance music at the end of each chapter.
I worked with sounds synthesised via both software and modular hardware synthesisers, played guitar, bass guitar, and accordion and tested the limits of distortion and destruction, imagining the deafening echoes of Tina’s story not being able to be contained by the theatre’s sound system itself.
In a more personal way, I explored my feelings as Tina’s long-term close friend who knows her story well, yet can never even attempt to understand it on the same level as her.
Presented Tracks
MOM: an excerpt from the chapter about Tina’s mother. Drawing loose inspiration from her favorite mid-2000’s alternative pop music, my work explores the effect of methamphetamine use on her vibrant personality, the instability she introduced into Tina’s life, both the love and the hatred that Tina developed towards her, and the reverberations her life will have for generations.
DAD: a two-part excerpt from the chapter about Tina’s father. It explores his love for the guitar and his grief over his decreasing ability to play as his years grew, his carefree spirit ever plagued by choices that could not be taken back, the way his time spent in prison affected both him and his relationship with Tina, and his sudden death—in Tina’s own words, “Your time with them doesn’t fizzle out slowly—it just disappears.”
Benší
Two kids are lost in a forest at night. They scream for their mom.
In Benší, Natalia Tina Jeleva and I process childhood grief through the fusion of Slavic ethnic and folklore music with noise, accompanying our performances with a contrast between Tina’s expressivity and my surface stoicism. Sometimes we play and sing, other times words fall short.
I swap between playing guitar, bass guitar, accordion, and synths, recitation, and outright screaming. Some tracks include pre-produced parts, also by me.
The musical compositions overall are the result of my and Tina’s close collaboration, with me being responsible for most instrumental parts, and Tina mostly handling the lyrics and performance.
I’m presenting a peek at MAMA KDE TY SI, a piece inspired by the story of Hansel and Gretel. Instrumental part is bowed bass guitar.
img2wave
A computer doesn’t know what an image is, nor does it know what sound is. A computer knows nothing, because it doesn’t think.
img2wave is a program that converts the data stored in an image to the same data stored as sound and back. For square 8-bit greyscale images, the conversion is lossless and completely reversible. The same holds for any 8-bit WAV audio. For other formats, no bytes are ever lost, except for information about image dimensions and image/audio bit depth.
The program also has a live mode, directly converting a webcam feed into audible sound, or microphone signal into live video.
Featured in Adéla Janatová’s award-winning book Smrt, transformace a reinkarnace písma (The Death, Transformation, and Reincarnation of Script).
Implemented in Python with a graphical user interface built with Flet. Not yet released; open to discussions about its use in other projects.
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