The Ear

The ear is a listening, surveillance, and Artificial Intelligence project. It is a device that collects human voices, transcribe them into text, and with that information create new texts. The ear is a machine that through an Artificial Intelligence system creates ideas in real time based on what it is listening to. This piece could be defined as an ironic idea of the surveillance system. In a way, it is not a perfect and functional machine, it constantly makes mistakes, degrading the original information from the source, creating erroneous and potentially false information, digital garbage that in a way undermines the expected fantasies of technology and surveillance systems.

This Machine uses the collected texts as a data set, acomulating day by day more information from the environment where is installed. In its exhibition, the data set is trained every day, accomulating more data, creating therefore texts based in the specficic situation where this machine has been involved, transforming this piece in a cultural aparatus. Then the AI texts generated are remotly showed in small parabolic speakers using a computer fake voice, returning the data to the acoustic world. The experience with the piece show how the human voice is transformed into a digital object and that could be analyzed, recorded, transformed, stored, and used, questioning the concept, sense and value of the information, privacy and freedom in our contemporary society, questioning the relevance of the information collected in surveillance systems, and the ethical and political limits in this type of devices. Also, is an listening experience based on AI experimental narrative created under the serires of mistakes that this machine do during the process, putting on evidence the unprecise, mistakes and gaps of this kind of systems, and how this procedure open up paths to unexpected narratives that are created by a very machine.