Thousand Questions

In this work the network asks “If I wrote you a love letter would you write back?” Like the love letters which appeared mysteriously on the noticeboards of Manchester University’s Computer Department in the 1950s, thousands of texts circulate as computational processes perform the questions (perhaps as an expanded Turing test) on its listeners. These questions are extracted in real-time from Twitter with the keyword search of the ‘?’ symbol to create a spatio-temporal experience. The computerized voice the audience hears is a collective one, an entanglement of humans and non-humans, that circulates across networks. If I wrote you a love letter would you write back? (and thousands of other questions’ ) (封不回的情書？千言萬語無人回 was commissioned by the Microwave International New Media Festival 2012.

The audio installation piece If I wrote you a love letter would you write back? uses procedural translation to collect discourse from Twitter and translate it into spoken words. Tweets are chosen from the live web based on the presence of the “?” character, which renders the search an at-times poignant record of questions that might otherwise go unheard and unanswered on Twitter’s broadcast network. The poetics of the piece thus combine human-generated language and computer-generated words, rendering the human inhuman through the process of audio translation while removing the questions from their original context and conversations. As an installation, the piece engulfs the viewers in an endless set of unanswered queries.

(Source: ELC 3)