Caitlin & Misha
From Davin Heckman
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In this presentation the artist duo Caitlin & Misha will describe their six year journey of creative destruction. They will detail how they combined literal destruction of sculptures with the creative misuse of various technologies to create participatory art that eventually evolved into the piece Ecology of Worries, which is part of the Glitch is the Soul of the Machine exhibition. Our Ecology of Worries piece in the Glitch is the Soul of the Machine exhibition evolved from our participatory art project called Worries Bash (website, video interview with Boston Art Review). Worries Bash is a participatory installation consisting of recorded worries collected from hundreds of people and presented as part of a continuous audio portrait emanating from fragile papier-mâché sculptures. When attendees tap or hit the sculpture a worry will come into focus so that it can be heard clearly before again submerging into an abstract murmur. Following the 2016 US election we began asking people what they are worried about and found people had a plethora of concerns at the ready. Can the destruction of these interactive worry vessels create space for clarity? Worrisome shifts in the USA’s politics triggered our interest in collecting worries. Leaders are drawing the culture inward while souring relationships with longstanding allies. The emotionalization of events by the media is engendering worries that swirl inside us, trapping us in manufactured anxieties. This project is an opportunity to collect various types of worries and consider similarities in emotional cycles across communities. A communal ceremony is used to create a celebratory environment which aims to help people share the burden of the worries collectively. The exhibition also includes drawings and data visualizations inspired by the worries. The first Worries Bash took place at Agva-CIAT in Berlin. Since then it has been at Proof Gallery (Boston), Blue House Gallery (Dayton), and Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, MA). The community adjacent to each exhibition location is always encouraged to contribute their worries anonymously by recording them online, directly at http://worries.io. Along the way Caitlin & Misha had to augment their paper mache techniques with a preservative to make their sculptures survive a humid Berlin summer, update their software so that the installation can be "tuned" to the electrical interference noise of each specific venue (which inevitably still causes "ghost triggers" of the sculptures which they embrace), and misuse all kinds of tools, including machine learning algorithms. This led the artists to their Ecology of Worries project (and other work). Ecology of Worries actively embraces various forms of breakage. By characterizing the synthetic worries of various sophistication as variously evolved creatures we are engaging the empathy of the viewers. It is one thing to experience a text generating neural network failing into mode collapse, which is a state where the system generates the same unchanging output no matter the input e.g. a string of the same repeating vowel. It is a whole other thing to watch a mode collapse personified by one of our critters: as we watch this creature struggling to get a word out we can’t stop ourselves from feeling like we should help it finish the sentence. The mode collapse glitched text result of ‘aaa aaaaaaa’ becomes a living wail. The critters in Ecology of Worries appear alive not because of any sort of omniscience a tech evangelist might expect from a digital assistant, but due to their very real flaws. The creatures become uncanny through a juxtaposition of familiar and abstract concerns.
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