The Dark Age of Connectionism

Commissioned by: Haunted Random Forests Festival

Exhibitions: Haunted Random Forests Festival, UK (2017); Extrapool NL, (2017); Sonic Arts Seoul, KR (2018); IMPAKT Festival, NL (2018)

An installation exposing hidden forms of AI listening, and what voice assistant cannot answer.

The Dark Age of Connectionism explores the hidden capacities of always-listening devices such as the Amazon Echo, and the capacities we have to unravel the massive systems which these devices rely upon.

The Dark Age of Connectionism inverts the hidden nature of the always-listening Echo, and offers multiple ways to critique how devices like this function. The installation’s microphones that surround the Echo are capturing nearby sonic data – voices, noises from phones, and other sounds. Each detected sound triggers a question spoken to the Echo through a version of Apple’s Siri voice assistant, questions that interrogate the politics and function of the Echo, or echoes the anxieties of living amongst these devices.

Each new sound around the installation prompts a new question from Siri, which will interrupt itself to ask new questions. To hear the questions and their answers in full, audience members must devise ways of being present around the device which do not create more sonic data for it, exploring how such objects in our homes may influence our behaviour if we wish to avoid their surveillance.