‘A man has been working in a windowless studio to make performances which nobody sees. After the event, the sounds produced by these performances are fed into speech recognition software. This transforms them into plausible poetry… although they have been translated or composed from audible bangs, wallops, scrapes and sighs.’ – Ian Hunt.

Our Book of the Month for October is Hearing Things by Aaron Williamson, a prescient 2001 work of prose and generative poetry using text to speech software transcriptions of live performance. Get it for just £8.75 throughout October 2025.

Artist and writer Aaron Williamson, who is profoundly deaf, investigates the language produced by speech recognition software in his distinctly lo-fi performance actions. Fizzing wax, furniture scrapes, fanned air and various other sounds produced by the performances are diverted from the artist’s deafness and converted into text by the hearing computer. Hearing things reflects on this process with a stream of prose poems that accompany the generated texts and the book is profusely illustrated with self-photographed images from the performances.

Williamson has a show just open at the Hansard Gallery which presents the archive of The Outlandish Collective – a group of disabled artists active in Hampshire from 1976-82 – which was bequeathed to the artist in 2022. The collective’s work is shown alongside a survey of Williamson’s work, including his collaboration with Katherine Araniello under the name The Disabled Avant-Garde (DAG). The show is open until 10 January 2026.