Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips
Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips
Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips is a research-based art project by Špela Petrič exploring forms of communication that exist outside dominant human-centered language systems.
The work approaches language as something broader than speech or writing — extending toward signals, gestures, biological processes, machine interaction, and subtle forms of exchange that often remain unnoticed or difficult to classify.
Presented through installations, archives, speculative documentation, and research material, the project constructs a fictional yet plausible institutional framework dedicated to “inconspicuous languages.” The result moves between scientific aesthetics, speculative fiction, and critical media art.
The project reflects recurring themes in Petrič’s work:
- interspecies communication,
- non-human agency,
- technological mediation,
- and the politics of perception and knowledge production.
Rather than presenting definitive answers, the work functions as an open investigation into how communication systems are constructed, recognized, and legitimized.
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