Speaking Through Machines // Installation

My GlogauAIR project was originally designed for a physical room, where viewers can visit to experience an uncanny, alternate reality generated by machines. The events of this year have taken away our interactions with the physical, replacing them with distilled imagery in the digital. My project will reflect and shift its focus to our relationships with this new reality, a world more and more governed by machines.

The first component of my project will be around how we communicate in this new world. Using two machines, two participants try to have a remote conversation without the ability to see or hear each other. The machines turn speech into a physical manifestation of a familiar SMS thread. The machines are not perfect in transcribing. Information is compressed and lost, words mangled or misunderstood. The black boxes convert what we know is real (speech) into something unfamiliar (waveforms and tensors). They reflect back our words, but sometimes in disjoint and manipulated pieces. Still, we hand over our trust willingly.