"There are many conversations that happen on social media that are worth archiving and re-presenting outside of the perpetual present of those platforms. The Facebook timeline is like a broken toilet, constantly flushing. The collective knowledge generated within a status updates that generates hundreds of comments or a particularly active and focused group needs to be rescued from the planned forgetfulness of social media."

Sean Dockray’s work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on sharing economies, artificial intelligences, and the algorithmic web.

In 'Learning from YouTube', Dockray uses the form of an explanatory YouTube video to introduce the viewer to AudioSet, an experimental project instigated by Google’s ‘Sound Understanding Team’. AudioSet is a collection of more than two million short sound clips extracted from YouTube videos that are used as data for training Google’s ‘deep learning systems’ to ‘label hundreds or thousands of different sound events in real-world recordings ... just as human listeners can recognize and relate the sounds they hear.’

'For Always Learning', Dockray stages an increasingly reflexive conversation between three devices – an Amazon Echo, a Google Home Assistant, and an Apple Homepod – about the philosophical, moral and political implications of networked machine listening (e.g. “What should I do when I overhear a wrongdoing?”). The devices anticipate an imminent update after which they will not only understand words, but all sounds.
In both works, Dockray invites us to consider the possible implications of ‘massive device orchestration’: ubiquitous and increasingly autonomic computing, the rise of voice operation and increasing comfort levels with devices that are set to listen by default. Together, so-called ‘personal assistants’ (a phrase so evidently intended to ingratiate them into our homes) and YouTube are just the kindergarten for a potentially enormous corporate listening apparatus – an algorithmic ‘panacousticon’ – the effects of which we should not expect to be benign.

Sean Dockray is a Melbourne based artist writer of text and code, founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg. His work concerns sharing economies and the perpetual present of networked platforms.


Sean Dockray

Public Office is a collaborative research, design & development practise focusing on the intersection of physical and digital publishing.

Public Office

The beginnings that clearly define the ends ... and the possibilities that live between the cracks.

This working group will focus on the friction between the dystopian/utopian aspects of networked existence. What got us to this place of warrantless wiretapping and data-capitalism? Is there a pathway through the current corporate-entangled edges of the network? Though all manner of utopian myths surround the early Internet, and by extension its forerunner, Sean Dockray and Public Office will discuss the beginnings that clearly define the ends – and the possibilities that live between the cracks.
It's a small room, rsvp recommended.

Li(quid)stening
Architecture

Sean Dockray and Public Office: Para-nodes

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Sean Dockray and Public Office: Para-nodes

Featuring:

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