Voices and Voids

Responding to current concerns about the ubiquity of voice assistants, Voices and Voids, focuses on building a series of performative artifacts that aim to challenge AI and ML technologies, and to examine automation through the prism of “ghost work” that constantly support these systems. By allowing AI agents to listen to our most private conversations, we become receptive to this mediated care, while forgetting or ignoring how much these automated interactions have been pre-scripted. While these interactions cultivate a sense of familiarization with the non-human, they also corroborate the impact of Late Capitalism and the Anthropocene. Within these contradictions, we see an opportunity to reclaim, examine, and ultimately transcode this data through an interdisciplinary performance project, 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, our changed environment during the COVID-19 pandemic inspired us to pivot to the medium of net art. The project consists of a series of 12 performative vignettes that transcode voice assistant data in multiple forms. These vignettes share interconnected themes such as automation, intimate narratives, translations in language, experiments with context, relation to the body, and forms of labor.