Are we ready for digital assistants in our homes? These devices that listen continuously and can answer our questions, turn on our lights or turn off the heating show that we are building new ecosystem structures that symbiotically link human agents with non-human agents. We may gain in convenience, as boring tasks are delegated, but at what cost? On the surface, the digital assistant is not a nuisance: it is a small, almost invisible object that can be placed in the living room or the bedroom. But in order to function, the device must record voice commands, process them, analyze them and store them in servers. A simple command to close the curtains then becomes an operation with high energy costs. In addition, these devices enter our privacy and often record without our knowledge. According to a report from Northeastern University (Dubois et al. 2020), "smart speakers" are reported to accidentally activate up to 19 times a day, recording 43 seconds of audio each time.
The work "Empreintes sonores" seeks to make visible what is latent: specifically, accumulations of sound data. In the installation, a Google Home Mini listens discreetly and records continuously. The captured sounds are replayed in a random way in the 4 loudspeakers and mix to finally end up in a sound dump - an imaginary virtual space in which would be found all the unused sounds that have been previously recorded by the digital assistants.
At a certain threshold, a fragment of sound is recorded, and the sound wave is projected on the wall, as if the sound were frozen in time and space. A motion sensor tracks the movements and allows the sound wave to be explored. Rather than letting the sound move towards the ears, it is rather, on the contrary, our ears that must move to travel through the sound: the latter is freed from its ephemeral and singular nature to inscribe itself in space, which allows us to perceive, for an instant, the sound imprint in the environment.
The participant is thus led to experience the continuous sound capture and to see the traces of it. The digital assistant is no longer this small anodyne object that disappears into the background, but an agent that secretly listens and manages continuous data.
Tags: interactive, sound reactive, digital assistants
