PHONEBOOTH
Made from an original Pacific Bell payphone purchased on eBay, PHONEBOOTH is a dystopian exploration of the absurdity and isolation that arises from the modern communication era. Upon picking up the receiver, visitors find themselves willingly subjected to extended periods of waiting on hold as they engage with the installation and attempt to navigate a complex phone tree while listening to continuous ai-generated advertising content. To modify the phone, I kept much of the original circuitry, added a Raspberry Pi to manage phone tree UI and record audio files, and replaced the speaker, mic, and wiring to up the audio quality. Other modifications included a dynamic LED array, sonar sensors to activate the ringer when a person walked by, and a megaphone on top to lure over potential customers with persuasive ad copy. Debuted on the playa in 2023. Done in collaboration with Emmett.
Planetary Guardians logo
I worked with designers at AKQA to create this animated logo for Planetary Guardians, a global initiative to mitigate climate change and safeguard Earth. The concept was based on point cloud representations of animal calls used in my work at ESP and previous studies of bird song; every dot represents a single audio component and their placement in 3-D space is determined by the latent representations created by an AI transformer model (AVES in this case). We selected three audio samples to illustrate the diverse forms of life on this planet: a soundscape from the Amazon rainforest, calls of Arctic terns in Alaska (the Northern end of their epic migration route) , and underwater recordings from the Great Barrier Reef. The logo was debuted at a press conference during the UN General Assembly in NYC in 2023.
Collaborations
Field recordings for Sirsasana
Creating by the team at Looking Up Arts, Sirsasana is a climbable, interactive sound installation depicting a tree doing a headstand. Laser-cut birds that were equipped with motion sensors were placed around the base of the sculpture, walking by the birds caused them to begin singing. The bird songs were created using my field recordings of songbirds from my research in Wytham Woods, Oxford UK.
Bird song recordings for Machine Auguries
Machine Auguries was a sound installation created by Daisy Ginsberg that used AI to illustrate the potentially harmful effects of noise pollution on the dawn chorus. The work applied generative AI models to several focal recordings of birds, including several hours of bird song I recorded during my PhD. The result was an distorted, otherworldly sound that birds might evolve in an imagined dystopian future. Link to Guardian article.