Installations The Walls Have Ears, 2020


Online art for an early pandemic-era virtual “cruise” comprised of a series of Zoom rooms. This room, created with Shlomo Zippel, was visually styled like a cramped crew member stateroom to evoke the enforced isolation aboard Diamond Princess that occured just before the event. Each visitor’s spoken words were fed into Chrome Web Speech AI and transcribed into text that would bounce around the screen, taking advantage of nonsensical errors in translation to confuse participants. During quiet moments, a selection of phrases and questions appeared and acted as prompts for discussion. This work was created to comment on truth in media and the dangers of echo chambers and AI. Inspired by Nate Horstmann’s work Mindmung (2017), it explored the rise of the Zoom room as both third space and walled garden for live remote interaction with its own rules and protocols.