all the boys ate a fish

Theodore Koterwas

Artwork Description:

Our voices come from deep within our bodies, but once out, are they still ours? Detached from our bodies, they are different, transformed by others. Deep fake voice cloning takes this further by putting words in our mouth. This interactive installation brings the human body back into contact with voice clones to explore how feeling them physically changes our experience. An artificial agent interacts with you as you move, prompting you to speak with phrases drawn from management training in “active listening,” and repeating what it ‘heard’ previous visitors say in a voice cloned from them. I adds what it ‘thinks’ you say to their words and begins cloning your voice, repeating the stitched together phrase through the floor and into your body in a voice that becomes closer to yours every time you speak. The phrase “all the boys ate fish” involves all the mouth shapes needed to generate a deep fake. The phrase evokes both Lord of the Flies, a novel based on the problematic notion that we are all naturally self-interested creatures prone to cruelty and violence, and “the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine,” the surrealist game in which meaning emerges collectively by piecing together parts of speech. This installation plays with these ideas about human nature, manipulation, absurdity and the algorithmic emergence of meaning to suggest the fraught nature of communication mediated by systems designed with a limited concept of intelligence and narrow interests in mind. It makes an exquisite corpse from living bodies.