Maria Ahmed‘s Beautiful the Chewed Sounds is a meditation on the meeting of analogue and artificial worlds, speaking through layers of image, word and sound. A six-minute looped video, collages and texts activate one another – sparking open, rhizomatic chains of connection. The work mixes references to nature, bodies, and machines until they begin to blur together, making it difficult to tell where one thing ends and another begins. 

The source material is a hybrid archive of found analogue and digital fragments that resists easy categorisation, including 3D scans, GIFs, old books and photographs, stock footage, AI slop, Victorian poetry, digital tags, cut up text and a 1926 music recording of Purcell’s Dido’s Lament. Together, these shards move and coalesce in hope of a new language emerging, somewhere out of the latent dark of a caterpillar’s cocoon.

At its core, the work asks how we might describe the contemporary moment— a time when the wet materiality of human vocal cords gives way to algorithmic speech, and where mobile devices translate flesh into Chroma-keyed prosthetics and the familiar mixes easily with the strange. It gestures toward a language where binaries dissolve, and the boundaries between voice, code, and body collapse into a field of mouths — where meaning trembles, transforms, and begins again.

Download a PDF version of the work here.