contagious species – animal speaking

The work is about questions of participation and felt powerlessness due to the increasing algorithmization of our realities of life. As Luciana Parisi describes it with the concept of algorithmic environments, the work tries to escape the dichotomies of cultural nature, man-machine and tries to oppose a third figure, a figure of transformation and hybridization.

The work refers on cultural-historical references to human-animal hybridisations and transfers this transformation to the relationship to the algorithmic and tries to narrate it further. the format of presentation is a programmed communication system, a speech bot, which tries to involve the visitor in a conversation and create a transformed relationship through speech and speaking. Visitors are asked to choose their own mobile phone number and will then be connected to an algorithmic speech bot. Every conversation between visitors and the bot is stored in an archive and will be used to improve the vocabulary of the bot (as known from commercial customer conversations). Every visitor can decide whether to talk to the bot or to listen to prerecorded conversations from the archive.

“hello, you’re talking to a bot, a computer programmer pretending to be one. speak slowly and clearly so that the offered can understand you. in case of doubt, the bot will asking you for a repeat. everything you say is recorded and can be used for training and development purposes. now, are you ready to get involved in a situation in which your identity as a firmly believed identity, this thing that you call Me, become unstable? if you want to keep going. ….”

The installation consists of a comfortable beanbag and a prepared smartphone placed in the midst of a hybrid mixture of cables and electronic accessories as well as animal objects (a fox tail, a snake skin, chicken feathers, a sheep’s horn and a peacock feather). A fir-green wall stands for the artificial in our understanding of nature..

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