‘Alexa, Google, 23andMe’
(Amazon Alexa, Echo dot, Respeaker, wall mounts, 2 x Google home mini speakers, speaker wall mounts, raspberry pi, router)
‘Alexa, Google, 23andMe’ projects near future developments as various forms of data, including biomedia and medical data, are brokered on a daily basis. It draws attention to the phenomena of a ‘currency of data’, and ‘data as a currency’ becoming more apparent on a daily basis.
The work takes a humorous approach to a worse case scenario, facilitated by the seamless interface language affords via Interactive Voice Recog units Alexa, Google Home, et al.
The IVR’s draw on Ami Clarke’s experience as an adolescent at the ‘Tall Girls Clinic’ Great Ormond street children’s hospital amid new ‘readings’ of her biocode via online DNA analysis: 23andme. As they go off-script (following the facebook dialog agents lead,) A.I. learns language through negotiation skills, whilst trading in the ultimate data of her biocode. They can be heard contemplating the production of value within a meme economy, amidst future projections of new gradients of measure within the burgeoning techno-capitalist landscape.
Ami Clarke's work has an emphasis on working within the emergent behaviours that come of the complex protocols of platform capitalism, and as such, the work aims to show how participation is bought through the hidden currency of data, accrued through analysis of the quantified self, the repurposing of which derives value in a myriad opaque ways. Earlier works explored how these dynamics contribute to undermine the very process of democracy itself, through psychological profiling, and targeting, at a granular scale. A new work, that includes a critical essay as dashboard, developing alongside the collective writing experiment: de-leb - a science fiction based on fact, time-stamped via smart contract on the blockchain - aims to explore the capacity to broker, and withhold, personal data through new technologies such as blockchain.
