The Materialised Temporality of Dust - exhibiting at @arselectronica2024.How can we experience the history of a site from a microbial perspective? The first phase of this project seeks to explore that question through an immersive VR and spatial sound experience, inviting audiences to delve into the RCA’s Kensington Campus through the lens of microbial life. Against the backdrop of a site previously subjected to dust sampling, this project contributes to the concept of the pluriverse—a world of many worlds—by reimagining the campus as a living tapestry shaped by non-human temporalities. The Materialised Temporality of Dust
Dr Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa (MX), Antony Nevin (NZ), Campbell Orme (UK), Laura Selby (UK) and Neil Aldridge (NZ)
1st version of Coil- The out come of residency at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine.
Have a conversation about genetics in exchange for a fruit popsicle with the specific nucleotide of the frozen fruit on it.
In Uncanny Valley of Breath, artists Carlotta Aoun and Antony Nevin worked with Trinity College researchers Ed Storey and Patrick Cormac English to explore the breakdown in communication between humans and machines that occurs in speech recognition technology. There are countless variations to human speech, from different languages and dialects to regional accents and pronunciation, and virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Google Home often struggle to understand speech that differs from the examples they’ve been trained on.
Breath is a key factor in the subtle nuances of language, giving shape to vowels and consonants, cadence and tonality through hundreds of micro-exhalations and inhalations. Yet for a Natural Language Processing AI, breath is a meaningless interruption of data, mere noise or interference. The installation highlights this machine bias by contrasting human and AI-generated speech using video projections of spectrograms (visual representations of audio frequencies
that illustrate fluctuations in sound and breath) which
trigger walls of PC fans to turn on and off in a way that
mimics the sensation of breath and makes the differences between human and machine perception both visible and palpable.
While an AI that can’t understand your accent may seem like an amusing inconvenience, when such technology is used to screen job applicants, process insurance claims, or provide telemedicine support, it’s hardly funny.
