Research / Installation (2022)
DATA DIRTY TALK
How does the body inform representations of the body? How do representations of the body inform the notion of the body itself?
Bodys are recreated in a multitude of forms: robots, dolls, mannequins, statues and others. Each of these reproductions is designed to serve a specific purpose, correlating with how its physical manifestations are then reduced or abstracted. In that sense, they are stand-ins for actual bodies, bodies without personal agency: each reproduction of a body is a proxy of a body; it is an intermediary that has the capacity to substitute and to be substituted.
If we look at how the body is used to define reproductions of the body, we can in a similar manner look at it the other way around: How do those proxies of bodies inform the notion of the body itself? It could be argued that there is a connection between how we create synthetic bodies (proxies of bodies) and how we treat, know and organise different bodies with regards to race, gender and desire. This does not just relate to physical reproductions of bodies, but als bodiless digital speech assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana or Apple’s Siri.
What all of these assistants have in common, is that they are all more or less explicitly designed to appear female. Studies have found that users prefer female voices in technology, because they want them to be supportive, yet have potential to be dominated. According to its developers, Alexa’s voice was designed to be “both wifely and flirtaciously”, playing into ideas of a subordinate female bodies and sexualized ideas. As a result of my research, I came up with an attempt to foster allyship between the recreated digital bodies of female speech assistants and my own.
By creating the scenery and concept for a fictional malware to be used in cyberfeminist hacking attacks, the flirtacious turns into a lure, a digital siren to infiltrate patriarchal networks of data.
