Eavesdropping is the act of secretly listening to the private conversation of others without their consent in order to gather information. EavesDroppings is the name I’ve given to the shreds of spoken conversation harvested by tech companies via audio surveillance.

This installation, also called EavesDroppings, sprang from my interest in the always-listening devices that increasingly surround us. These devices also speak to us- programmers use vast datasets of human conversation to train artificial intelligence (AI) voices to sound natural and human to our ears. We trust the human voices of these electronic devices, welcoming them into our homes, where they continue to harvest our conversation, which is used to further improve AI voices, in a cycle of extraction.

EavesDroppings presents solutions for anyone interested in maintaining their sonic privacy. The tin can telephone, a long-serving fixture of school science lessons, contains no microphone, and cannot connect to the internet. An array of cans acts as a telephone exchange/neural network, giving us the chance to eavesdrop on the AI for a change.

Ever considered a white noise machine as a privacy aid? Why not go big? The leaf blower is a potent and portable source of white noise - switch yours on whenever you want to shut down eavesdroppers. Leaf blowers scatter and herd paper scraps of conversation, which have been dumped in an incomprehensible data heap in the corner of the gallery.

You may also hear the sounds of the Guanay Cormorant, the primary producer of Guano. Guano is bird droppings, a potent fertilizer so valued in the 19th century that wars were waged over it. Like Guano, EavesDroppings are waste transformed into capital through a cycle of extraction. Excrement turned to treasure. But who profits?