Artist
Afroditi Psarra
Title
Ventriloquist Ontology
Date
2022
Medium
HD Video, 16:9, with sound and color, 9’41”
Credit line
Afroditi Psarra, Ventriloquist Ontology, video, 9’41”, PCAI Collection
It is a commissioned work by PCAI in the occasion of the exhibition Sheltered Gardens.
Object label
Ventriloquist Ontology explores the limits of control and hybridization between human and machine through the relationship of a performer and a wearable entity. This entity articulates text generated using the GPT-2 language model, trained on a dataset of texts around biopolitics, algo-governance, the surveillanced body, and queer theory, and manifests itself by producing involuntary movement through a series of linear actuators. The concept of ventriloquism is used to give agency to an ontological entity composed of subtle suggestive wearable modules, human flesh and cognitive motor abilities, born-digital, able to produce novel language, but also conditioned to reproduce the biases of its algorithmic parts.
