Description:Q6350
Excerpts of interview with Scourti about Advice From The Fallen, conducted by Carl Gent on 25th July 2023:
"It came out of the fact that the main piece that was in the show was this two hour video piece [...] based all on transcriptions, purely a text and sound video and it’s all from automatically transcribed voice memos that I’d been kind of collecting for a period of over a year, maybe eighteen months, right up until the show opened. So some of it was kind of reflecting on the show as well as I was trying to work out what the hell I was doing with it. And the video itself used this algorithm this software that I’d developed with Blank Shuck. And and what we did was develop this algorithm which detected emotional valence in voice and mood [...]
I was really interested in forms of surveillance that attempt to do affective monitoring, not just a blank identification of the voice but the idea that you could detect mood or feeling [...] So while I edited the text down and fed it into this algorithm I also had reams and reams and reams of text and I put that into three categories: positive, negative and neutral. I wanted somebody else to work with them, so instead of using an impersonal interface to read through this stuff I wanted to also connect to other writers and also writers who are friends [...] ask them to interpret it in anyway they wanted[...]
What Juliet did was pick up on the voice [...] very specifically in terms of gender recognition and frequencies associated wth certain genders, so she reflects on that and retains some of the some of what was the original transcriptions. And then Holly wrote poem[s] and used the bits where the automated transcription fails because it is trying to detect English, it’s hearing Greek and it’s coming up with total nonsense. It’s not a human transcription so it’s inaccurate [...] And then Mira’s was almost tackling the emotional tone [...] almost using the phone as an expanded therapist or friend rather than calling someone and going uahhhhahhhuhhua! or whatever, whatever stuff you say, when when youre in states of high anxiety… Mira’s channels a lot of that [...] almost like advice or telling yourself something. And that’s where the title comes from."