Voices + Voids: website launch, moderated discussion and online performance organized by the Jacob Lawrence Gallery
Following a full year of creative research and multimedia experiments with my collaborators Audrey Desjardins from UW Design and Bonnie Whting from UW Music we finally had the opportunity to present to the world our project Voices+Voids: Reclaiming and Transcoding Our Data as Performance through an online event organized by the Jacob Lawrence Gallery and its curator Emily Zimmerman.
The project consists of multiple performative vignettes that explore voice assistants and voice interaction data as materials for artistic creation, examining the idea of mediated care that these devices provide us, surfacing the hidden labor behind its automated systems and probing the limits of familiarization and intimacy of our everyday interactions with these systems, and how much of our personal information we are willing to share with the tech giants that control them by developing embodied experiments using a combination of design, data-driven art, cyber crafts, found-object and traditional percussion instruments, spoken word, and movement. Initially conceived as a live performance and installation event, our changed environment during the COVID-19 pandemic inspired us to pivot to the medium of net art.
To explore the individual performative vignettes visit: Voices + Voids
Here is the press release of the event:
As voice assistants like Alexa and Siri become nearly ubiquitous, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are increasingly integrated in our lives, listening to our private conversations, and responding to our queries with automated replies. What does it mean that we’ve become familiar with these non-human interactions? What is the labor that goes into creating and supporting them? What are their limitations?
Voices + Voids responds to these questions and contradictions through a series of interdisciplinary, virtual performances and vignettes that challenge AI and ML technologies and consider the ways in which they corroborate the impact of Late Capitalism and the Anthropocene. The research project, which began in 2019 and continues through December, seeks to reclaim and ultimately transcode voice interaction data through embodied experiments that combine design, data-driven art, cyber crafts, found-object and traditional percussion instruments, spoken word, and movement.
As they begin sharing publicly their Voices and Voids research and explorations, University of Washington Assistant Professors Audrey Desjardins, Afroditi Psarra, and Bonnie Whiting are coming together on November 20 for a Zoom conversation, moderated by Jacob Lawrence Gallery Director + Curator Emily Zimmerman. Desjardins, Psarra, and Whiting created Voices and Voids and are leading the project, which also features contributions from a dozen additional artists in residence and collaborators.
Voices and Voids is made possible with funding from the Mellon Foundation and the University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences.
Watch the online event that took place on Friday, 20 November 2020 at 10 am PT here:
