A Slip of the Machinic Tongue (2022)

A coincidental sequence of squeaks and electric shocks triggers one of numerous voicecontrolled listening machines still passively operating despite the long absence of human operators. In this noisy articulation of random happenstance, the device detects a message which serendipitously commands it to recall events that preceded this moment. Left to their own devices, the machines begin to inspect historical motivations for entangling human voices with technologies. Exploitation, as they soon realize, was one of them. Being no longer at the service of humans, the speaking machines have to seek new incentives for sustaining their existence.

In great part a piece of speculative fiction, this performative soundscape installation draws on historical events and inventions concerned with technologically-aided human voice synthesis, recognition, and capture, including some instances of error, misspelling and lapsus. One of such instances was a demonstration of Speaking Machine invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. During the presenation in London, the machine unexpectedly pronounced the word 'exploitation.' Or, at least, this is what the audience heard. Drawing on this 'slip of tongue,' the piece explores exploitation as one of the foundational principle of the voice machines' lineage. Accompanying illustrations result from experiments in sonifying images and converting them back into spectrograms. They include archival images of early speaking automatons along with photos, headlines and news snippets from online databases and articles concerned with AI, voice, autonomy, tech-tycoons, long-termism, and more.

The performance was premiered at 'Digital Existence III: Living with Automation' an international conference at Sigtuna Foundation in Sweden, organized by BioMe project and featuring Joanna Zylinska, Katherine Hayles, Nick Couldry, Sarah Pink and others.

The performance is based on an essay written for a book 'The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age', edited by Olle Essvik (Rojal Förlag, Göteborg 2022). A dialog between several repurposed 'smart' speakers is accompanied by a spontaneously evolving soundscape generated by those devices' electromagnetic fields and micro-currents that make them operational. The piece is a component of an artistic inquiry into other, imperceptible voices and sonic realms that underlie and sustain contemporary technologies of voice recognition, synthesis and biometric capture. The project is part of BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Bio-metric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds led by professor Amanda Lagerkvist at the Informatics and Media Department of Uppsala University.