All the Boys Ate a Fish

‘All the Boys Ate A Fish’ is an interactive installation investigating how physically experiencing an artificial agent cloning our voices and mimicking our movements impact on empathy, identity and otherness. An artificial agent interacts with you, prompting you to speak with phrases drawn from corporate training in active listening, and repeats the most recent things it’s ‘heard’. When you speak, it adds what it ‘thinks’ you said and begins cloning your voice, repeating the stitched together phrases in a voice that becomes closer to yours every time you speak. The voice it generates comes from under your feet, re-entering the body as vibration via 24 tactile transducers installed in the floor tiles. The voice follows you as you move, the artificial agent having been trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning to mimic your motions. The work plays with ideas about human nature, manipulation, absurdity and the algorithmic emergence of meaning to provocatively suggest the fraught nature of communication when mediated by systems designed with a very limited concept of intelligence in mind. It attempts to make an exquisite corpse from living bodies.