Your Voice || Our Voice

A Mixed Reality Installation at the Museum of Conetemporary Photography

Corporate technology’s role in reshaping our democracy has been palpable. Search engine optimization, procedurally generated news, filter bubbles, and algorithmic politics championed by Silicon Valley cowboys have co-opted the voices of the people. Your speech has become data that does not belong to you. Your speech has been monetized and hollowed out. Your speech drives advertising revenue as quickly as it forces us apart. 

Your Voice || Our Voice is a collection of photography and augmented reality to highlight the toxic relationship between democracy and corporate technology. The east side of this exhibition features halcyon photos of Greg Stimac’s, Mowing the Lawn Portfolio (2006). Stimac frames photos of Americans mowing their lawns as bemused and somewhat bored by the banality of their task. The west side shows photos of struggle, violence, and social justice from a range of photographers: Darryl Cowherd, Shelby Lee Adams, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. This dichotomy in our democracy is observable. [[even as?]] Our technologies have divorced our perception from this reality. In the center of the exhibition [[gallery?]] two iPads encourage visitors to speak to a side of the room, while spoken words are co-opted and hollowed out by an algorithm displayed by projection on the south wall. Once the system corrupts the speech, an avatar of the speaker is created with augmented reality—invisible to the naked eye but seen through an iPad. The duality—technology’s invisibility and its perceptible impact—can be experienced by the speaker as they hear their stolen, corrupted speech through their estranged avatar. Throughout this gallery’s course, the space will fill up with avatars in time. How democracy turns out, what the avatars are saying, you can only partially control.