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Back at the gallery for week 3 with an awareness that I need to start "making" something soon. The appearance of the Instruction Station needs to change. This is not just for show - the space informs what happens in the space, and I just as my actions are shifting to accommodate changes in my approach, the space needs to too.
I've been thinking of ways to bring the conversations back into the space that doesn't involve simply printing them out or putting them on screens. I'm thinking of an audio system that attempts to immerse the audience in a summary of what's happened before them. There's not enough feedback happening and I'd like it to be more immersive or abstract.
However, I hate audio that leaks, polluting the rest of the space, so I'm looking at building a parabolic speaker that will focus the sounds into one particular area. If anyone wants to help me do this (or knows where I can get a large plastic sphere with 30% cut off) please get in touch.
The Black Box continues to spit out nonsense text. It's about halfway through the current batch which is a mashup of Birmingham council documents taken from website and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy. I've started thinking about the next batch and have decided to let Louise, programme manager at BOM, decide on the ingredients. She wants to seed the council docs with cyber/tech feminist writings, and I'm totally up for that. Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, Sadie Plant, that kinda thing. We need lots though, so please send in any authors or titles you know of. (We'll find digital copies through the usual means...)
Over the weekend I received my copy of A Field Guide to the Snowden Files, an amazing archive of and commentary on artworks made in response to Snowden's revelations in 2013. There's a load of really inspirational work and some of the essays cut right to the point. It wasn't cheap so I'm not expecting people to buy it. I'm leaving a copy in the gallery so if you want to have a read, come by.
I also came across an academic paper on Folk Theories of Social Feeds which is a bit heavy in places but definitely worth mining for inspiration. It's a real insight into how "normal people" think about the algorithmic systems they interact with and should hopefully tie in with my ideas about AI Cargo Cults.
