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After Words

Date:2022
Format:8-channel sound installation (18 minutes, looped), printed material.
Credit:Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker, Joel Stern)
Index: installation

View the official documentation for this installation on the Machine Listening website

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Machine Listening, After words, 2022, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne. Photograph: Lucy Foster.

Description

“Imagine a computer made of humans. Imagine this computer as a new kind of theatre. Listen.”

Data is never mined. It is always made. A computational theatre. Many datasets are literally performed by actors, or researchers pretending to be actors. Others are the product of our own performances for and with machines, every time we ‘wake up’ Alexa or upload a video to YouTube.

After Words explores these dynamics across a series of speculative scenes. Each scene works with readymade audio, repurposed from machine learning datasets, and woven through a script written with and against an ‘autoregressive language model’. The result is a strange set of semi-fictional tales of computational scripting, instruction, production, and performance, staged in 8-channel audio. In this strangeness, After Words gestures at a near future in which language has been fully operationalised: where every word we speak has a computational effect and residue.

Researched, written and produced: Sean Dockray, James Parker, Joel Stern. Voices: Mark Andrejevic, Sean Dockray, Jake Goldenfein, Roslyn Orlando, James Parker, Thao Phan, Joel Stern. Design: Stuart Geddes.

Commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Audio

Note that this is a stereo mix of the 8-channel installation.

Script

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Machine Listening, After words, 2022, detail, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne. Design: Stuart Geddes. Photograph: Matthew Stanton.

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Installation images

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After Words, Cricoteka Tadeusz Kantor Museum, Kraków, 2023

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After Words, Cricoteka Tadeusz Kantor Museum, Kraków, 2023

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After Words, Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, 2023

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After Words, Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, 2023

Exhibitions

Presentations

  • Articulating Data: vocalisation, machine listening, and the (in)security of language in a digital age, University of Edinburgh, 2023
  • Radiophrenia, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, 2023

Media