'Paper'

June 15th

Short papers / The Voice of the Machine Audience

Authors: Anthony Stagliano

Work:

Home smart devices form an increasingly present audience in daily life. This hidden audience expresses itself by shaping how we address it. This is a rhetorical, acousmatic voice, since such media devices shaping and coaxing our behavior, blurring the line between speaker and audience, human and non-human, agent and machine.

Typology:

Paper

Theme: Sound Studies; Digital Personal Assistants; Surveillance; Voice; acousmêtre

Venue: CCCB

More information: http://anthonymstagliano.com

Abstract: Smart devices in the home, like Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri, form a non-human but increasingly present audience in our daily life and activities. This hidden audience expresses a certain voice, in the agential sense, by cultivating and shaping how we address it. This is an acousmatic voice in Michel Chion’s sense of it, and is worth thinking about as a rhetorical form, with such media devices shaping and coaxing our behavior, blurring the line between speaker and audience, human and non-human, agent and machine.

Biography: Anthony Stagliano is a scholar of rhetoric and a filmmaker/media artist, whose research concerns creative interventions into technologies of surveillance, biometrics, and control. His monograph on that research is under contract with the University of Alabama Press. His films and media art works have been shown in festivals and galleries around the world. His feature narrative film, Fade, was released theatrically, on DVD, and to streaming platforms.

Venue

CCCB

Montalegre, 5 - 08001 Barcelona

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