In a world populated by an increasing abundance of Artificial Intelligences (AI), it has become more and more important for us to understand the behaviours of our smarter machines. AI promises perfect systems designed to master their functions. As humans, we have imbued these artificial creatures with senses. We have given them the ability to communicate to an ever nearer degree of naturalness; speech and hearing being the most developed. With these efforts, we expect these systems to be as perfect as we have designed them; but what about errors? Beautiful mispronunciation? Hearing loss? Faded meaning? What about the little misunderstandings that makes us human? Can a machine suffer from them and experience them also?
Digital Whispers is an installation that sets seven computers and one human in to a game of Chinese Whispers. The visitor inputs the seed sentence into the “ear” of the first computer and the dialog of ethereal whispers continues in a chain until every machine has had its say. Each computer can hear and talk. It whispers to its neighbour the sentence as it comes into its “ears”. Errors evolves involuntary (or not), creating word chimeras, often resulting in absurd sentences only a robot could have created. The final phrase spoken back to the visitor, most often with surreal overtones, leaves to question the machine as a reflection of humanity.