Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15, was a collaboration between Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and RedLine Contemporary Art Center to celebrate RedLine’s fifteenth anniversary of artist residencies and fostering education and engagement between artists and communities to create positive social change. Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15 presented a juried group exhibition featuring the work of RedLine alumni artists, including past participants in RedLine’s Artist Resident and Resource Artist program. Curated by Miranda Lash, MCA Denver's Senior Curator and Leilani Lynch, MCA Denver’s Associate Curator.

The curatorial team invited me to present a new, expanded and site-specific iteration of one of the central works from my Eavesdroppings series of 2022. In response, I created Eavesdroppings (Exchange), a mixed media installation with multi-channel audio.

Eavesdroppings (Exchange) engages with contemporary issues of data privacy, surveillance, and the growing presence of artificial intelligence in everyday life. The work is rooted in the act of eavesdropping, or covertly listening to private conversation, which has been intentionally mobilized by governments and corporations to surveil private citizens for national intelligence and marketing purposes. Increasingly, the material harvested from eavesdropped conversations are used to train and improve AI technology.

With Eavesdroppings (Exchange), Ben Coleman suggests a low-tech “solution” to avoid data extraction through the form of a tin can telephone. Coleman’s work inverts the role of listener and speaker, allowing visitors to eavesdrop on the AI voices. He shares, “The voices you hear are AI voices. They recite a script which combines datasets of conversation, marketing copy, online reviews for anti-surveillance devices, and excerpts from the script used to formulate the AI speech of Apple’s digital personal assistant, Siri: hours and hours of nonsense words and phrases recorded and broken up, to be reassembled into any word or phrase when needed”.

Description courtesy of MCA Denver

Photo credit: Wes Magyar & Leslie Herod