We've all been told to walk ten thousand steps a day, a number that turns out to be a marketing campaign from a Japanese pedometer company, chosen because it was memorable and because the character for ten thousand (万) resembles a walking man. This is how an arbitrary metric reshapes how people see the world, revealing metrology's power over contemporary life. In East Asia, ten thousand also carries an older history as a kind of practical infinity, as in 만물 (萬物), “the ten thousand things” or “all things”. Today, the measurement systems shaping us are digital: machine-built sonic metrics like MFCCs, spectral centroid, and zero-crossing rate raise the question of how this new way of measuring reshapes contemporary life.

Ungefähr (Approximately) is built from years of the artist's personal data (conversations, emails, bureaucratic documents) reduced to the top ten thousand words that appear most often within them. Taken together, these words form a self-portrait. The artist reads all ten thousand words aloud, and the recording is analysed using the same audio features developed for machine listening. The words are grouped into clusters by shared timbre and envelope. This is a sonic dissolution that the server rack mirrors. Normally sealed off and clinical, it too is opened up: pierced by light, and repurposed as a meeting point between two people. Visitors are invited to sit, place a small device on the table, and listen to the original recording of the ten thousand words from which this portrait was made.