Saul that is hilarious - it explains a lot! And thanks so much for fessing
up after 11 years. Excerpts from the chatlogs are on the archive website
and I can guess which ones may have come from your intervention - which
was absolutely within the spirit of the work and the time - fabulous!
The piece was - deliberately - problematic. For me one of the key
questions it was asking was that of content - whether one could get beyond
mere handwaving (I'm here)/verification (are you who you say you are?) and
have a meaningful conversation (much akin to the kind of verification that
takes place in seances through mediums - which I have some - indirect -
experience of), and I think a true conversation was indeed extremely rare.
But it did throw up other constructs such as the collective sentence
(where more than one internet user posted a text string one after the
other).
The other 'problem' was the imbalance between the street participant and
the internet one. Saul mentions his surveillant impulse. The people online
of course could see and hear the people on the street (if they were within
range, while the internet users were disguised by both distance and behind
the computerised voice. The computer voice I chose 'Victoria' was the most
generic and also relatively androgynous (of its day) which was why I chose
it.
The issue of control came up also. In Brighton - the first and arguably
the most successful iteration along with Amsterdam (mainly due to both the
placement of the work but also the street culture) - the computerised
voice appeared invested with the power to compel passersby (complete
strangers) to do things - for example sing a song or do a dance. In
Amsterdam a man eventually was compelled to kiss the projected image. This
actually happened.
On 23/11/2012 14:20, "Saul Albert" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Hi Susan, all,
>
>On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 01:19:43PM +0000, susan collins wrote:
>> A work that I (first) made in 1997 (which I think is one of the reasons
>> MariaLaura invited me to participate in this debate) was a piece called
>> 'In Conversation' [http://www.inconversation.com]. It was a work which
>> connected the public space of the street with the 'public' space of the
>> internet
>
>In the context of this discussion, I thought it would be useful to add
>something of my experience of this piece.
>
>I watched the street in Berlin 2001 via my web browser on a borrowed
>JANET connection for a few hours, and even used it to conduct a short
>and amusingly broken conversation with you, Susan, while you were
>troubleshooting the installation.
>
>The piece struck me as problematic in lots of ways, although I could
>also appreciate that those problems seemed artistically intentional and
>came with the bricolage-like use of the technological artefacts you
>mentioned, with their linguistic/cultural specificity (US accented
>English pronunciation only), as well as the somewhat surveillant impulse
>that drew me in to gawp at the piece.
>
>Being an enthusiastic amateur programmer, I coded up a critical clone of
>your web interface to the piece that allowed viewers to submit text to a
>form that would first translate the text via babelfish's famously
>bonkers automated English->German translation system, and then submit it
>to your original web form, which would then speak garbled, mispronounced
>German straight onto the street in Berlin.
>
>Then I think I posted it to some IRC channels and mailing lists I was
>on, along with a link to the piece, and some fairly puerile hilarity and
>some interesting discussion ensued.
>
>Nonetheless, I think my activity was something like art criticism or
>connoisseurship - which took a form that was consistent with the piece,
>and was inseparable from its contemporary technological/cultural milieu.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Saul.
>
>--
>mob: +44(0)7941255210 / @saul
>sip: +44(0)2071007915 / skype:saulalbert
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