Evasion Score
Roslyn Orlando
2021, graphic score and video demonstration, 3 minutes 18 seconds.
Commissioned by Firtsdraft. Courtesy the artist.
Soft Power presents experimental responses, new critiques and speculative futures in the face of myriad power systems we must confront and dismantle. Like her peers, Roslyn Orlando explores what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power.
In recent years, smart speakers have developed the ‘ability’ to listen to human speech: to identify words and phrases, and to respond intelligently. In 2018 The Atlantic reported that by 2021, there will be “almost as many personal-assistant bots on the planet as people”. In 2019, The Guardian described the “frictionless computing” of smart speakers as a process of “colonising the user’s home”.
Evasion Score is a downloadable graphic score and video demonstration that proposes ways of using the voice to evade detection from domestic smart speakers. Various vocal techniques are used to prevent speakers from 'listening' to and understanding speech. The idea is that these vocal techniques can be incorporated into everyday speech; adapted, built upon and used iteratively in human-human interaction.
Roslyn is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, video, text and experimental music. She is interested in the ways new technologies produce language, communication and meaning. Her work explores how these networked systems infiltrate, co-opt and disrupt our ontologies, emotional transmissions and experiences of time, memory, death, desire, friendship and other socially formed cognitions.
Use this downloadable graphic score to try your own evasive vocal techniques.
Build upon these example sentences by using words and phrases from your own life. Adapt and share with others in conversations where smart speakers and devices are listening.
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