1998
Instrument designed in collaboration with members of the Interrogative Design Group, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT: Adam Whiton, Sung Ho Kim, Kelly Dobson, Jerzy Stypułkowski, Bogdan Soboński, Todd Polenberg, Christe Erickson; built at Brooklyn Model Works. Projects featuring the Ægis carried out in: Berlin, New York.
The Ægis, the last and most technologically advanced of the Xenological Instruments, was designed as a dialogic device, allowing the users to dialogue with others and themselves, multiplied in recordings of their own person screened on two monitors. Each screen is connected to a computer with a built-in voice-recognition sensor that reacts to certain predefined phrases. The Ægis facilitates multidirectional dialogue: the screens displaying the user’s faces can be turned towards each other, towards the user, or towards other speakers. This is a device, the artist stresses, “serving the immigrant’s art of survival, but also meant for those who experience alienation for other reasons.” Pre-programmed dialogues make it possible for the users to talk to themselves about their own alienation. Allowing us to communicate with others as well as to hide behind a pre-recorded narrative, the device takes its name from Athena’s protective shield.
