As part of the Articulating Data project, we are delighted to have been able to commission three original artworks which address and explore the themes of the symposium. The artworks – Agnes Cameron’s Working Group, Claire Tolan’s LULZ NOON, and Theodore Koterwas’ The Unreasonable Expressiveness of Empathetic Artificial Mimicry, will be exhibited at the symposium.
Working Group | Agnes Cameron
Working Group simulates a bureaucratic process and conversation system, through a looping group dialogue. The entities in the system are constantly changing their state and beliefs in response to one another, and over time the conversation both changes and responds to its environment. Viewers of the work are invited to participate in the discussion and submit proposals to the deliberation process — as the agents respond to new input, new loops and systems become possible.
Working Group is a browser-based work, built in JS/CSS/HTML on the client, and using a Python server to run the simulation. The text of the work is primarily taken from the W3C mailing list.
Agnes Cameron is and artist and engineer who works across a range of technologies and media. She is particularly interested in agent-based modelling, alternate histories of computation, and open-ended systems for structuring knowledge. The piece she is developing for the symposium, Working Group, constructs a group dialog in the context of an ongoing bureaucratic process, in which the audience may also participate.
LULZ, NOON | Claire Tolan
LULZ, NOON is a whispered audio play starring Alice and Bob, the long-suffering couple of cryptography papers who can never seem to attain secure communication, alongside a cast of their archetypal friends, collaborators, and adversaries. LULZ, NOON is an absurdist neo-western about surveillance, control, secrets, typed characters, permissioned environments, and the horror and ecstasy of losing oneself in desire, in devices.
Claire Tolan (b. 1986) is an American artist, writer, and programmer living in Berlin. Tolan has worked primarily with ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) since 2013. Her work is concerned with the perception and poetics of whispered speech, with a particular focus on rumour, secrets, and enthralldom. Tolan hosted an ASMR radio show, “You’re Worth It”, on Berlin Community Radio from 2014-2019. With musician Holly Herndon, she co-wrote and performed “Lonely at the Top”, the ASMR track on Herndon’s 2015 album Platform. Other past projects include SHUSHTONES, packages of ASMR ringtones; Die Siedler von SHUSH, an ASMR tabletop RPG prototype; CICADA GAMES, an augmented reality ASMR audio play; and SOOTHER, a prototype AI ASMRtist. Tolan has exhibited, performed, and presented her work at venues such as Martin Gropius Bau, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berghain, Volksbühne, Münchner Kammerspiele, ArkDes (Stockholm), and Sónar+D.
Tolan is currently building a web3 ASMR video and audio platform, MURMUR, while composing stories, plays, and papers that orbit the platform conceptually and performatively. In addition to her work with ASMR, Tolan has served as CTO of two startups and worked as a programmer and technology strategist with various startups, NGOs, and universities. She studied Literature at the University of Chicago and Archival Science at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Tolan’s commission for Articulating Data, LULZ NOON, is a whispered audio play starring Alice and Bob, the long-suffering couple of cryptography papers who can never seem to attain secure communication, alongside a cast of their archetypal friends, collaborators, and adversaries. LULZ NOON is an absurdist neo-western about dysfunctional relationships, typed characters, permissioned environments, surveillance, and control.
The Unreasonable Expressiveness of Empathetic Artificial Mimicry | Theodore Koterwas
There is a troubling de-humanising of communication in our interactions with voice assistants, particularly considering the power dynamic implicit in “assistance” and the implications for our relationships with humans who also provide it: as simple examples, no longer saying “please” and “thank you” or acknowledging a job well done. In this interactive installation the types of voice recognition and synthesis models used in voice assistants respond to your presence in the room by prompting you to move and speak and then repeating what you say.
This is not to expose the models’ linguistic failures, but to explore the possibilities of unpredictable success when the power dynamic of servitude is removed and replaced with one based on mimicry, embodiment and entrainment, the foundations of empathetic communication.