Voices and Voids: Subverting Voice Assistant Systems through Performative Experiments by Audrey Desjardins, Afroditi Psarra, and Bonnie Whiting
In June 22, 2021, together with my collaborators Audrey Desjardins from UW Design and Bonnie Whiting from UW Music, we presented our paper Voices and Voids: Subverting Voice Assistant Systems through Performative Experiments at the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference. The paper culminates the ideas that were developed through this multidisciplinary project in an extensive documentation and reflection.
Here is the paper abstract:
Responding to concerns such as privacy, surveillance, and the commodification of personal data with regards to voice assistants, this artistic research focuses on creating performative artifacts and vignettes that challenge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. By allowing AI voice assistants to listen to our most private conversations, we become receptive to their mediated care, while forgetting or ignoring how much these automated interactions have been pre-scripted. With our project Voices and Voids, we reclaim, examine, and ultimately transcode these voice assistant data through interdisciplinary performance and Post-Internet Art. In this paper, we thematically describe 12 vignettes which represent embodied and sonic experiments using a combination of design, data-driven art, cyber crafts, found-object and traditional percussion instruments, spoken word, and movement. We conclude with a discussion of how the experiments worked as a multifaceted whole, and how we used interdisciplinary methods as a central approach.
Because of the virtual format of the conference we presented the paper through a short video:
To read the full paper visit:
