VENTRILIO is an emotionally deprived AI on a quest for love. While the question “what is love” percolates through the machine, it becomes obvious that the answer to the question is as desired as the object of the quest. The installation consists of a custom-made 3D-printed ventriloquist doll controlled by a robotic arm, a Raspberry Pi and a loudspeaker.
VENTRILIO performs the age-old act of ventriloquism with a twist. Namely, the doll vents the voice of the AI while being controlled by a robot arm. VENTRILIO, the machine, learns by scraping sites off the web where humans leave traces of their deepest desires: dating apps, social media, Tinder and comments on porn sites. As a sounding board on the quest for love, VENTRILIO appropriates a form of critical ventriloquism and flirts with the unsettling feeling – the uncanny valley – by getting acquainted with an anthropomorphic doll.
VENTRILIOBoris Debackere (BE), Jerry Galle (BE)
Installation, 2019
Boris Debackere (BE)
Boris Debackere is an artist and researcher lecturing at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. He serves as head of production at V2_, Lab in Rotterdam, an instigator of projects that interrogate and illuminate contemporary issues in art, science, technology, and society. His interdisciplinary practice revolves around the materiality and performativity of virtual environments and the experiential impact of media. He won the Georges Delete Prize and received the Ensor Sound Design Award.
Jerry Galle (BE)
Jerry Galle explores idiosyncratic uses of image and language that are co-created with algorithms. The mediation of the world through ever profiling, falsifying and quantifying images and texts that are both bot and human generated. These images have had a dramatic impact on conceptions of art, humour, absurdity, politics, economics and language itself. His practice critically reflects this mediation using websites, drawings, electronics and manipulated texts, presented both offline and in the public space of the Internet. His work has been shown in MuHKA, Bozar, Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, British Film Institute, Wiels, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF, International Film Festival Hamburg, Museum Dr. Guislain, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Ars Electronica among others.
Contact: http://www.jerrygalle.com, http://www.jerrygalle.xyz
